


Lethe and Mnemosyne

by montparnasse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: First War with Voldemort, Ghosts, Kinda, M/M, more like malevolent but vaguely sexy haunting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-09 00:53:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10400106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: Winter '79. Looking to get out from under the black-hole overhang of wartime, Sirius and Remus take off to play house on the Cornish moors. It goes downhill from there.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for r/s small gifts 2016 a few months back, with a massive thank you to Claudia, to whom I still owe my soul <3 I love you, bud.

A month after they moved in, Sirius’s cigarettes disappeared. In itself this wasn’t unusual, as he was prone to losing them to the murderous and possibly sentient couch along with loose change and lighters and memorably a pack of bubblegum-flavored Muggle condoms which they didn’t need but which he’d thought would be hilarious (it was); sometimes houses and the things in them developed a personality or a certain malicious quality nurtured by magic, spun into being by the very molecular threads of it imparting life where there wasn’t any. Already their coffeepot had begun complaining about the quality of Remus’s coffee and the Muggle rotary telephone in the hallway sometimes rang just to say hello, which all made Sirius wonder what things might be like in ten years, when the walls knew them and the threshold of the doorway waited for them to come home.

Upstairs he checked his nightstand and then Remus’s just in case. Everyone who thinks they know anything will tell you that you don’t really know a person until you’ve lived with them, which is a fucking lie, but more importantly he’d known Remus since they were both eleven years old, and sometime around fifth year his habit of stealing Sirius’s clothes out of the laundry had taken on an endearing sexiness even when Sirius knew he was going to meet Dearborn in them later on, and thus he reasoned there wasn’t much they could do to truly despise each other—roommate-wise, at least. Several years of waking up naked in various outdoor locales with each other’s blood on their teeth and occasionally puking together in the milky-blue rime of dawn had also cured them of a certain amount of mystique where the other was concerned. Once you’ve told someone about your family’s extensive collection of magical torture instruments in the basement (still in use for select medical procedures) and let them throw up on your feet, there’s really no going back, and the golden umbilical thread of it stretched ineffably between them was such that Sirius would never have wanted to.

Still—his cigarettes weren’t ensconced anywhere between the cushions and Remus didn’t smoke menthols. He’d been rolling his own since seventh year because it was cheaper, and although he’d often grab Sirius by the back of the head and kiss him after he’d just taken a drag he said they burned his throat. Sirius himself had offered on numerous occasions to buy them for him among a great many other things, truly he would have blown half his inheritance happily on anything Remus wanted just to see the smile unabstracting on his face, but such offers were usually met with glacial rebuffs or an affronted retreat back into the impenetrable nautilus shell that was his tortured soul, or more likely his bruised ego, coaxed out again only with an apology and/or food. That had changed as so many things had and so many things hadn’t in the wild whirlwind rush since they’d started fucking a year ago, but Remus had always been fairly adamant about hating everyone else’s cigarettes as some perverse point of pride.

“Did you take my cigarettes?” Sirius asked him anyway. 

“Why would I take your cigarettes.”

“Maybe you finally gave up the charade of extreme pretension. Or maybe you lost your rollies, I don’t know.”

Remus was sitting on the couch trying to untangle a strand of Christmas lights for the tree, which they’d just put up earlier that morning. Last year they hadn’t bothered with one but it seemed important now, given the permanence of having been in love for so much longer than they knew it and the steady disintegration of the reeling world, the cocktail of which was the impetus for their move all the way to Cornwall in the first place. The whole cottage smelled like pine and woodsmoke and the lavender they were growing on the windowsill for potion-brewing after the full moon, which Sirius had also taken to baking into shortbread in the sharpening cold weather; with everything unpacked it was almost disconcertingly domestic save for last night’s Ogden’s Old on the coffee table and the lone sad marijuana plant Disillusioned on the bookshelf, struggling under the collective weight of their dismal herbology skills. On the television a silent movie was playing, the sepia candle-flare flicker of the film giving the room a kind of submarinean glow.

“It’s not pretentious if you know what you’re doing,” said Remus, working out a knot in the cord. The moon was in two days and the wide brimming gyre of it seemed always to hum inaudibly to Remus’s bones like a primal tinnitus from which all the other pains fed and grew, slouched in on himself as if to push it deeper down. Sirius sat down next to him and rubbed his shoulders and his neck where he knew it hurt until he could feel him unsharpening, all the edges of him flowing back into Sirius’s hands as if he could really reach far enough inside to take the blossoming hurt of it away. “And your cigarettes taste like lighter fluid. Have you checked—”

“They’re not under the cushions although who fucking knows what happens to everything that falls in there. And I don’t hear you complaining when you’re yanking me down by the hair for a taste.”

“Yes, well. I like your mouth,” said Remus, smiling into it, as if that was some kind of revelation. Still, he didn’t always elucidate the quieter voices, or maybe the screamingly loud ones, so when he did Sirius committed them to the warp and weft of his memory with the fervor of a historian and spun them on repeat like a DJ with a stack of records. “We’ve got to get eggs later anyway and we’re nearly out of bread and your stupid Darjeeling. And if you were feeling especially festive I guess we could like, look for a cookbook or something.”

“You could buy me that Raincoats record,” said Sirius, pressing his thumbs into Remus’s spine notch by notch and feeling the tight spool of him shiver and melt, “if we’re getting into the jolly old spirit early this year. Don’t act like you weren’t just working your way up to ask me to cook you dinner.”

“I might’ve been but you’d do that anyway,” said Remus. That he was certain of it was either a testament to the all the miraculous, mutilated miles they’d come together or the burgeoning horrorshow of the world tearing away all certainties but the ones they found in the solidity of each other, depending on who you asked and when. Possibly it was both. In the spirit of it he leaned forward and kissed the top ladder-rungs of Remus’s spine down to the collar of his flannel, where he could feel the narrow strength of him thrumming like a love song in the spaces between his teeth. “Have you seen my Joan Baez records by the way? I can’t find them anywhere and I’d like to hope you’re not asshole enough to hide them under something disgusting in the cellar. You whine about them enough.”

Sirius laughed as if he was not indeed asshole enough to have entertained variations on that exact idea and had never in their entire history together complained loudly and frequently about Remus’s Joan Baez records. “I didn’t touch the things but I’ll buy you new ones if that’s what it takes so I have any chance of getting laid sometime in the near-ish future.”

“So selfless,” said Remus, slurring sweetly, “my bloody hero.” One of Sirius’s hands had strayed completely accidentally to his inner thigh and beneath it Remus pulled his knees apart. “I must’ve lost them in the move,” he said.

“Maybe they found their way to some ageing hippie in need of some protest songs for Christmas to go along with the bad incense and the dirty feet. Actually maybe that’s what you’ll end up like in another thirty years—it’s sort of sexy when you think about it. You with like, a huge beard and the uncombed Joplin look.”

“I could start teaching with Sibyll Trelawney. Part-Humans in Magical Society. The syllabus would just be me.” In lieu of better options Remus had been doing underpaid freelance writing and editing for textbooks and various magazines for a year, and pseudonymous reviews of bad punk tapes for obscure publications for even longer. Sirius loved them and often provided suggestions for crackpot false names.

“Burning palo santo and becoming one with nature and letting the kids bum cigarettes after class.”

“If you think making fun’s going to get you laid either,” said Remus as he took Sirius’s hand and pressed the palm of it between his legs, where he was already half-hard in his jeans, and as it turned out making fun did in fact get Sirius laid.

It was the first occasion they had any inkling that something was afoot but nothing much registered at the time except the fruit of Remus’s mouth and how their skin smelled like new snow and lavender, the winter light lancing golden through the single-paned windows and the sparse trees illuminating all the things that were theirs, the yearning that came from the places where their bodies touched. All of this would be important later as a sort of punchline in the hilarious cosmic joke that was the bullshit trajectory of their whole lives to date, strung along always like unwitting chess pieces in someone else’s apocalypse gamble. The next morning Sirius would remember none of it.

—

The cottage was a bright birdhouse of a thing set on the winding granite moor like a fixture of the ancient landscape itself, sloping gently from the roof to the stone foundation into the earth as if it had been born there with the heather and the bilberry tangles where it had crowned the wide bowl of the Cornish sky with the scattered cairns and the tors since time immemorial. In the yellow kitchen there was a woodstove they lit in the evenings and a stone fireplace in the living room they’d only just gotten connected to the Floo network, where they could see the lake a mile away from the unshuttered front windows where the hills curled up greenly beyond the stone fence. Their bedroom was a loft above the kitchen with a big cloud-fuzzy window on the far wall and a treacherous ladder leading down to the stone tile; they’d strung up two strands of round Muggle lights between the walls which they spelled back into place whenever they went up or down, a necessary safeguard given that there was neither a door nor railing and both of them were likely to bust their heads open on the floor and/or fry themselves on the woodstove while drunk or trying to navigate down the ladder to piss in the night. Outside the kitchen window Sirius had hung a birdfeeder, and in the mornings when they made coffee they would watch the birds flit happily back and forth from the clothesline to the feeder to the trees, finding in the nearness of it all an echo of sweetness he normally only got from music or a certain pitch of laughter he pulled out of Remus, resonant as magic.

Certain of their friends had been moving away from London for nearly a year, eager to escape any number of spectres—the fear, the confinement, the death, the past, the present, themselves—and in autumn of ’79, after funerals and nightmare flights late at night and a series of Order-delegated infiltrations where they increasingly fought for their lives (Remus landed in St. Mungo’s after one of them) they started talking about getting out of the city for a while as a pseudo-vacation from the grief, as if a change of scenery might help compensate for the fact that they had become ancient seemingly over the course of a year and a half. That summer James and Lily had moved into a small house in Essex and Peter was trying to hammer the estate he’d inherited in Cheshire into something presentable; Frank and Alice had eloped for some incomprehensible reason (they’d be divorced by twenty-three, he and Remus wagered unkindly) and taken off to Cambridge, Vance and Macdonald had left for St. Andrews and Yorkshire respectively, Shacklebolt had headed for Leicester, even Dearborn had scattered into Shropshire, which was possibly the most un-Dearborn place in the whole of the green earth. McKinnon and Meadowes were still living together in Somers Town and unlikely to leave, which left Sirius and Remus, the other common knowledge couple whispered about after Order business had concluded, dreaming scandalously of playing house in the countryside.

Dumbledore had approached them in October on behalf of a friend of his who was looking to rent out a cottage in Cornwall way out on the moor with a striking stone’s-throw view of the lake. Remus had grown up in the West Country, in an old crooked farmhouse in Somerset with an abandoned apple orchard surrounding the backyard in a crescent; as a teenager Sirius had fallen in love with it while visiting in the summers when they would all four take long walks and leave their apple cores for the birds or swim in the pond or go to the Muggle record store or the arcade in town. Down by the river Remus had taught him to fish, and both of them sometimes helped his mother with dinner while James and Peter looked through Remus’s records upstairs, Remus out of a sense of obligation, Sirius out of fascination with Muggle kitchen appliances and also with Remus’s mother, who he loved, who often played Dylan and Joni Mitchell and Ida Cox while she was cooking, feeling jealous and entranced. At the time it seemed ideal, even magical in the cosmic sense, and later they would realize that accepting all of this at face value from Albus “Ulterior Motive” Dumbledore, renowned puppetmaster extraordinaire, was mistakes number one through eight hundred, but for now, all of that was in the future. They said yes. The rest was history.

Immediately after Hogwarts they had moved together into a two-bedroom flat in Kentish Town, ostensibly to pool their resources and split rent between them but mostly because they hardly knew how to be without each other. Between his inheritance from his Uncle Alphard and his starting salary as a junior cursebreaker Sirius didn’t need help with rent and often paid in full anyway, which usually prompted Remus—potions stockboy, bakery assistant, hack astrologist, post office owl cage cleaner, freelance pest wrangler, Cambridge reject, professional bitter stoner permanently attached to the very meat of Sirius’s heart and soul et cetera by some manifest spiritus mundi—to blow an inadvisable chunk of his bank account on ingredients for a lavishly rich dinner or tickets to noise shows in retaliation, or otherwise hide the weed and not speak to him for three days. He had begun to suspect around fifth year that his increasingly obsessive feelings for Remus were not actually brotherly, or not _only_ brotherly, especially after he walked in on him with Dearborn in a disused third-floor classroom in the brittle-boned January of that year; he’d known what Remus looked like naked since they were twelve but he had not known the taste of his mouth, the warm hallowed space between his hipbones, his arms reaching, his face open and drunk with wanting. This became several hysterical magnitudes worse when they moved in together: at first they had both shared Sirius’s bed because Remus hadn’t yet bought one, and although they slept top to tail for the duration their long limbs did often wander.

It necessitated a truly humiliating amount of masturbation in the hallway bathroom late at night, which didn’t stop when Remus got his own bed as it had not stopped since the idea had stuck in his head like a burr sometime well before the episode in fifth year. He went out with Remus or on his own and pulled men and sometimes women before he gave up completely; he envied Remus his certainty during their talk after the Dearborn incident (he hadn’t exited the room as discreetly as he had thought), telling Sirius with a wild and fractious edge-of-the-bed nervousness not unlike the revelatory confrontation in second year that he wanted men and only men, his hands clenched between his knees to hide how badly they were shaking, bird-boned, ready to cut and run or maybe wanting a fistfight. Understanding the same of himself took Sirius the remainder of his Hogwarts years and some fraught time after, plus a whole fucking lot of disappointing orgasms. Combined with his preoccupation with Remus like an exalted illness that had overtaken him it felt royally pathetic; if he really applied himself during his drunkest agony soliloquies he could blame his parents for that, too.

Remus never brought men home but Sirius knew he spent nights away and suspected strongly that he still hooked up with Dearborn from time to time when he came home smelling like the wood-heady cloves Dearborn smoked. On those nights Sirius got stoned in bed listening to too much Talking Heads and Magazine, searingly jealous and not as guilty about it as he maybe ought to have been, reading Rimbaud and composing scathing verbal eviscerations in his head for the next time Dearborn blatantly hit on Remus in front of him at Order functions, but as he never wrote them down he always forgot everything in the throttling hangover wreckage of morning, save for select bits of genius that usually ran along the lines of _fuck you_ and _very very_ and _if you really cared about him you wouldn’t make him listen to fucking Pink Floyd all the time_ and _I’ve seen it and it’s like the size of my ring finger actually_. That last one was slightly cruel: Dearborn’s cock was a little bigger than Sirius’s ring finger, as Sirius had discovered when he slept with him just out of Hogwarts to see if he was some kind of sexual messiah and if so maybe he could pick up a few things. It wasn’t the worst sex he’d ever had—that was with Leandra Sapworthy, who kicked him bodily out of her bed after a graduation party, hissing _Are you a fucking queer or something_ after a detached five minutes of attempted fucking followed by thirty seconds of attempted fingering, which he laughed about hysterically in the shower—but sexual messiah Dearborn resoundingly was not, and Sirius was left wondering, insanely, unendingly, fever-hungry, whether Remus had ever had a good blowjob in his life.

Sometime in early September of ’78 he’d gone to see Lily at the Lambeth flat she was sharing with James, looking to cajole information and/or advice via a bottle of Scotch, though things veered off course almost immediately when he ended up waiting on the steps until she got off her shift at Gringotts and let him in. She seemed genuinely happy to see him, if mildly suspicious, and set about making Scotch coffee while Sirius overcame the needling splinter of guilt at having sought her out on her own for the first time for such selfish reasons. Nonetheless it didn’t stop him from bringing the conversation swiftly around to what, exactly, Remus had been doing lately, and had she seen Remus lately, and did Remus seem a bit morose and preoccupied lately, but he hadn’t finished the sentence before Lily slammed the coffeepot down, rattling the dishes in the cupboard and sloshing water from the counter to the floor, and fixed him with a copper-green glare that would’ve done a basilisk proud; her patronus would change within the year, he decided.

“Oh my _God_ ,” said Lily, her jaw working, yanking down her red braid where she’d pinned it up that morning, “you’re just, you’re fucking unbelievable, Black, you know that? Yes, I’ve seen Remus, and yes, fine, I’ll tell you the same thing I told him, which is that if you two want me to be your confidant-cum-shrink-cum-advice columnist, you’re damn well going to start paying me like one. I’ve got better things to do than change Remus’s nappies 24/7 and I’m sure as fuck not going to do it for you.”

“No one ever changed my nappies, the nanny used magic,” said Sirius, the smile shriveling a dead insect when he saw the look on Lily’s face. He never knew what murderous was before he met Lily; even so much sorrow later, after he’d fled people who were trying to kill him and after his hands had learned the shapes of spells to kill them too, he would sometimes look into their livid white faces in the thick of it and think, coward, coward, you don’t know a fucking thing. “I mean I’m sorry, I just figured—”

“That I’m a woman and I’m sympathetic to your plight so you’d come ply me with Scotch and your woe-is-me romantic ineptitude and leave as soon as you got what you wanted because clearly I think of nothing but men and their idiot problems,” she said. “You _never_ would’ve come here and played James the same way. Neither of you.”

Sirius thought about arguing for a single split second but it was true. He’d never told James (whether it was any of her business or not, Lily was generally more inclined to say something outright if she noticed, which she had, very quietly, once or twice), and he knew Remus hadn’t either, though James had suspected it of Remus since third year and had doubtlessly heard rumors about both of them in school; sometimes he joked about it in an off-pitch way that wasn’t really a joke, and Sirius never knew how to feel about it and didn’t think James did either. After everything, after childhood and scintillating adolescence and love and pain and death and forgiveness and revelation and and life life life, this was something Sirius did not—could not—share with James.

“Alright. I’m a prick and I really am sorry. Remus is a prick too. You can keep the bottle and I’ll pick up a curry for you if you like, or if you want to scare James I’ll even play along when he gets home and pretend we’re fucking around.”

“Tempting, but let’s wait until he’s really pissed me off for that,” said Lily. “You’d think two people who live together could manage to talk to each other once in a while without expecting the nearest woman to clean up all their messes for them. Get me the milk, would you?”

“Long day in the gold mines?”

“These creeps came in three times on behalf of that pureblood club, the one in Chelsea? Wanting to make enormous withdrawals and giving me this horseshit about ‘expanding their influence in the public sphere.’ You know they’re all just sitting around jerking it now that Lucius Malfoy and Yaxley and all those fucks got in the Ministry. Then there was a security breach down in the catacombs that turned out to be a niffler. And like, a thousand million tourists.”

“You really need to start doing the drive-thru thing like at Muggle banks,” he said, pouring an altogether inappropriate amount of Scotch into both their mugs, “those things are wild. I cashed a check at one of them and went through it on foot because I didn’t have the bike and they thought I was weird as hell but it was incredible. They could do it like, on broomsticks, with the suction tunnels Muggles use.”

“You are weird as hell,” said Lily. “But I don’t think anyone in Merrie Olde Magical England is going to be incorporating Muggle ideas anytime soon.”

Lily had gotten into Oxford during their final term at Hogwarts but decided fairly quickly to take a year off to work for the then-fledgling Order of the Phoenix; that year off was looking increasingly likely to last indefinitely, and just a month earlier several professors had resigned over the university’s refusal to expand security measures in the wake of an attack on Muggleborn students. Still Lily rode her bicycle past the Westminster Society for Traditional Magic and spat on the lawn on the way to work every morning out of sheer spite. “Christ Lily, I used to have dinner with these types. They can’t even admit Muggle music is vastly superior to anything we’ve ever done and they’re all inbred at least eight times over and they think they’re meant to inherit the world,” said Sirius. “It’d be nice if we could have a single iota of certainty about anything whatsoever lately.”

“Wouldn’t it just,” said Lily, and passed him the sugar.

September shivered into October and then November blue, the trees showing their bare-boned branches through the shroud of fog outside the flat while he and Remus either argued over nothing or talked about nothing and mostly sort of avoided each other in the same rooms as they settled into an awkward unknowing. One morning Remus came back with a hickey on his pale neck where he’d left his collar unbuttoned and stared back at Sirius when he caught him looking. After his explosive and deservedly fruitless trip to see Lily both of them seemed to sense that something had shifted in the patchwork tectonic anatomy they shared between them; when he was Padfoot sometimes he swore he could catch the scent of it in the moon-mornings, omen-sharp like gunpowder or distant smoke, both of them bruised and naked and too loopy with unsleeping to remember their cornered-animal unease. They took turns in the bath and he rubbed runic patterns into Remus’s back while he puked and after they’d both gone to bed in the rush of dawn Sirius stared into space for hours, worrying that the careful, timeworn net they’d woven through years of friendship—mended so many times, sewn stronger, threaded deeper, scarred over—had been irreparably damaged by their gutless emotional bullshit. He took to leaving his door cracked slightly open while the moon sucked the light from the stars into its widening mouth, a thin bolt of nighttime gloaming underneath like hope, but Remus never came to him.

Sitting on the couch in Cornwall reading record reviews after they’d gotten home from a Muggle movie in the village—the soles of their boots had stuck to the theater floor—it seemed almost distant. So much smoldering what-if to chew on in the dead of night, so much sturm und drang over words and phrases and looks and touches and what it meant that Remus slept in Sirius’s shirts and kept playing “Ball and Chain.” In the sunlight of retrospect it seemed very obvious and yet still against all odds, as if the only place it could logically have led was to their couch with his long legs spread out audaciously in front of him and Remus’s feet in his lap, the colorful rugs on the wood floors, the mushroom pot pie they’d attempted in the oven, the dirty dishes in the sink and the scattered records and their bed piled with dark flannel and a few scarves the size of blankets, all the pieces them shoved into every ecstatic corner. Time seemed frozen here, even when they came home with blood on their clothes or half-sick with anger or fear, which was maybe what started it all. The past portends the future, however much we pretend otherwise. You could never truly get away from where you’d been.

—

Two days after the full moon Sirius woke to an infernal nightmare slamming that was still there when he blinked the dreams out of his eyes in the dark. Remus had a hand around his shoulder and was shaking him harshly in case he wasn’t yet awake; he was a much lighter sleeper than Sirius although both of them usually woke at least once in the night since they had learned late in ’78 what it meant to run literally for the sake of life or death. He sat up fast with his heart beating under Remus’s clammy hand on his bare shoulder and reached for his wand on the nightstand but the noise stopped suddenly after a shattering violent blast that shook the bones of the whole house, quiet hanging shrill on the air, as if it had never been at all. Beyond the muzzy yellow string of lights separating the bedroom from a bone-breaking fall onto the kitchen tile nothing moved.

“What,” hissed Remus, still clutching at Sirius’s arm, “what was that?”

“How did they get past the wards,” Sirius said. His breath was coming too quickly and there was cold sweat on his brow. “We should send a patronus, but—” His voice was hoarse with sleep and the fear was rising in a nauseous wave up his throat. “Do you hear—”

“No,” said Remus, not letting go, “no, nothing.”

“Let me,” said Sirius, getting out of bed and struggling into the wrinkled t-shirt lying on the floor, “you’ve got your wand?”

Together they descended the narrow ladder into the kitchen, where Sirius turned on the lights and peered cautiously out the window into the black nothing-night while Remus checked the bathroom; straining his ears he could hear the wall clock in the living room and even the alarm clock on Remus’s nightstand in the bedroom above but no whisper of movement or sound crossed his senses. Before they got to the living room from the cramped precipice of the hallway Remus turned all the lights on with a spell muttered under his breath, and already the vicious fearful thing he got about him when he was cornered was in his every jagged movement, but he didn’t jump when Sirius put a hand between his shoulderblades and spread the fingers out in a nervous wave as they stepped forward together, aware in unspoken terror-transfer that their guts could be painting the walls in the next three seconds if they weren’t careful.

But—nothing. They shook the curtains and shined their wands up the chimney and Remus pulled the cushions off the couch—Sirius’s cigarettes still weren’t there but a key he didn’t recognize and three sickles were—and looked up the branches of their lopsided Christmas tree. Fear and swelling panic gave way to bewilderment; he cranked open one of the windows and stuck his head out to listen, feeling the blunt edge of the moorland winds slice against his face until Remus yanked the collar of his shirt and pulled him back inside by the scruff of his neck, rolling the window shut again.

“You suicidal shithead. What are you _doing_ ,” he said, trying to look livid but mostly just looking scared. Sirius could almost feel his hackles raising. “If there _is_ something out there you’re going to get your throat ripped out just showing it like that. You’re a dog and you still don’t even know that.”

“Well I can’t hear anything. If someone was out there and didn’t Apparate I might’ve heard something, don’t be daft.”

“If they’d Apparated we would’ve heard it. We’d have felt.”

“Yes.”

“The wards,” said Remus, touching the tip of his wand to the edge of the ceiling where the spell was illuminated in spiderwebbed blue ink, the walls made of words. “These are fine. Would you—I’ll get the kitchen, just check the bedroom, would you?”

Sirius did, but immediately Remus followed him through the kitchen and stood at the bottom of the ladder, ready to leap up if need be. The walls glowed blue-veined like glacial sculptures when Sirius touched them, murmuring voltaic under his fingertips; through the curtain he could see just beyond the stone border in the low lemon-drop moonlight where the ancient oak tree on the path leading to the disused barn was shivering in the wind with a spindly hunger, the claw of it creeping sickly shadows across the lawn.

“Alright up here,” he said. Hovering at the bottom of the ladder Remus stepped aside to let him back down, his green eyes big with unslept red underneath. “We’ll have to check outside, and _no_ , I know, I know, I’m not going out there right now so get that look off your face. Although I think whoever it was is gone. Maybe they were lost.”

“We don’t even have neighbors,” said Remus, warily, which was right. The nearest other house was three miles away down the gravel road, the closest village six. “Who’d be out here wandering around on the wild and windy moors at,” he paused to look at the clock, “almost four in the morning?”

“Very _Wuthering Heights_ when you think about it. I always figured I’d do that to you—drive you mad, be with you always via endless haunting to the end of your days, all that. You’d make a good Heathcliff.”

“It kind of loses its potency when all I’d want is for you to haunt my every step. Knowing both of us we’d be trying to have ritual sex with ghosts,” said Remus, though he was smiling lithely. “Besides I think we’re both Heathcliff.”

“I’m probably more likely to slam my head against a tree on purpose out of ravaging unendurable love.”

“Funny.”

“I thought so. If we really tried we could probably outdo both of them.”

“You don’t think it could’ve been an animal?”

“I don’t know what kind of animal would do that,” said Sirius, trying to remember where lethifolds tended to congregate and not feeling any better at all.

“A—I don’t know, Sirius. Some sort of feral magic?”

“It sounded like something very solid to me,” said Sirius. He wondered if Remus thought it might be Greyback—he’d been spending more and more time infiltrating packs in the south both unaffiliated and aligned with Voldemort—though if it was Greyback he’d likely have left something dead on the doorstep or thrown it down the chimney and wouldn’t have cared about setting off all their wards. In ways it was easier to be a non-entity in the city than it was out here with no shield and no gauzy veil of light and concrete and sound to vanish into; he took Remus’s wrist, feeling the familiar time signature of his pulsebeat under his thumb. With all the lights in the house lit they went back to the living room and fixed the couch cushions.

Deep in his chest something had begun to tighten but he couldn’t place the feeling; it was the same spreading pinprick-pang that constricted sometimes after a fight or a colossal fuckup or something otherwise terrible had happened, or was about to happen, and he often wondered when he felt the burn of it if it was yet another genetic malady courtesy of his black blood—his Black blood. Wonderingly and perhaps naïvely he had always thought that part of himself could match Remus tear for tear: all of your life lived with the inexorable presence of another festering inside you not as a pleasure or a beloved twin but as your every fear scorching and screaming somewhere you could never reach. No one made potions for this. No one could spell it or cut it or love it away.

Listening to the ball-lightning crackle at the back of his neck he went to the front door, where he could feel it settle into the spaces between his spine-rungs like an itch. Trying not to let the feeling overcome him he took a breath and let it sift like a conduit into his fingertips and reached for the doorknob; it turned right through and the door came wide open with the cold shrill-glass wind and the moon-dimmed Cornish stars.

“Holy fuck,” said Remus. At the threshold Sirius pointed the light from his wand into the dark beyond the yard light but saw nothing except for the strange perpetual glow of the boathouse on the island at the very faraway center of the lake, and when he stepped back inside and locked the door tight the magic had diffused in a static shudder down his spine.

“I locked it,” he said, feeling his stomach drop out. They’d gone for a short walk in the twilight gold after he’d gotten off work and when they’d come home Sirius had locked the door behind them. “I know I locked it.”

“I saw you do it,” said Remus, fear in it again, “before we started the fire, we brought some wood in and then you locked it, I—Jesus—I was watching you because you said you secretly liked my awful folksy Baez a little bit.”

“First minute there’s any hint of light at all we have to Floo the old man. And I like it when _you_ sing it all under your breath while you’re attempting cleaning spells or applying for jobs that don’t deserve you, there’s just, there’s a massively sexy difference, Moony. I’ll be happy to explain it when my guts don’t feel like someone just jumped rope with them.”

“You’re only saying that because you’re tired and you thought we might die five minutes ago.”

“No, I’m saying it because it’s true and it’s in like my top twenty favorite things you do, along with the thing where you try so hard not to laugh at my bad jokes but you always do. You’re so easy.”

“I’ll hold you to that. Coming from you it’s practically a proposal.”

“Please do,” said Sirius. “Do you want to just stay down here with me? There’s no way I’m getting back to sleep and I’m still not sure I’m _not_ going to send a patronus to Dumbledore, it’s not like he’s never woken us up for nothing at least five times before.”

“Let’s hold off til morning. D’you want some whiskey?”

Sirius did, and after they checked that the back door was still locked they turned off the lights and ensconced themselves on the couch with the afghan they kept draped across the back of it and their coffee cup whiskey, leaving the lamp at the end table on. Around five Remus dozed off on Sirius’s chest while some old black and white movie was playing on mute, his too-long limbs and his coppery hair and his eyelids fluttering with unquiet dreams, all of him wound around Sirius like ivy vines; occasionally he talked in his sleep, just a word or a hallucinatory phrase, which would’ve been a welcome distraction from the feeling that someone was watching them, peering through the windows or standing in the darkened mouth of the kitchen, following the runic movement of his hand on Remus’s back and in his hair for whatever secret could be found there. A few times he turned his head towards the doorway expecting to find someone staring but of course nothing was there.

They got up before dawn having slept miserably and made coffee and slightly crusty scrambled eggs with tomato and mushroom and goat cheese though neither of them was very hungry. As soon as the sky lightened enough for it they went outside and checked the wards around the stone gate and the border, which were as intact and undisturbed as they were when they had cast them more than a month ago, the same day they moved in. When they looked at the front door they found nothing—not even a scratch where it had been beaten hard enough to rattle the whole cottage, so that it might as well have been a shared nightmare.

Way off in the distance from the doorway he could see the funny phosphorescent window light of the island boathouse. He was not sure how he had never noticed before, but it had the uncanny feeling of an eye staring, like a lighthouse looking impotently but faithfully out to sea or an animal waiting hidden in the trees for prey.

“Do you think anyone lives in that thing?” he asked Remus, jerking his head towards the lake while they examined the windows and the bright paint-chipped shutters.

“According to Dumbledore, no,” said Remus, but his brow furrowed slightly. He was wearing his blue thrift store coat and Sirius’s fisherman’s sweater and the red wool scarf he’d had since Hogwarts, which made him look like a man cobbled together haphazardly but extremely appealingly from a deranged sewing machine. “Were all the lights on like that when we moved in?”

“I don’t remember,” said Sirius. The wind blew his tangled dark hair in his eyes and when he blinked he could see the milky afterimage gleam of it like an evil omen.

When they crouched down on the stone of the fireplace to Floo Dumbledore the old man was immediately fascinated if strangely unsurprised by the ordeal and knelt down to better see them, his cornflower eyes twinkling in a way Sirius had decided recently that he did not like after Remus had come home soaked through with blood from the botched job attempting a liaison with vampires who had already pledged themselves to Voldemort, and in St. Mungo’s needing a transfusion he’d still seen fit to ply information from Remus’s blue mouth. Particularly he picked at the exact moment when it had stopped, seeming not to care about the unbroken wards or the unlocked door or the fact that they had been scared shitless for hours or whether Death Eaters had developed cloaking spells of deadly magnitude; he asked if they had noticed anything else amiss, and Sirius, exhausted and impatient and tired of the cloak-and-dagger questioning, interrupted him for the first time he’d ever dared.

“We want to talk to the landlord,” he said, his voice running full-force over Dumbledore’s in a way that felt monumentally wrong. “If there’s something going on with the house we need to know about it. I want to know if he owns that old boathouse too, because it looks like someone’s staying in it and I can’t remember seeing anything over there before.”

“That boathouse has been unattended for decades,” said Dumbledore, “and the owner of your humble abode is currently ill. Winter is a difficult time for him, I’m afraid, which I believe I told you when I showed you the house on his behalf.”

Stupid stupid stupid idiot motherfucker, he told himself bludgeoningly. Never ever once had they actually met the landlord, an ailing Mr. Kilburn who lived at an unlikely-sounding address in Cumbria where they owled their rent checks; it had been Dumbledore who showed them the house when he heard they were looking and negotiated the lease. Yet again Sirius was thinking dramatically of Yeats—turning and turning in the widening gyre—and something cold in his gut slotted at last into place and bottomed out. This is how it is now, he thought, no silver lining without a cloud, no favor done without the exchange of blood, tugged along forever unwittingly by some unseen hand.

“Right,” said Sirius. Beside him he could see Remus’s clenched jaw, his rigid shoulders. “Is there anything else you want to deign to tell us, _sir_?”

Dumbledore looked at him shrewdly over the rim of his spectacles and Sirius braced himself against the ganglion-plucking of legilimency that never came. “Thirty-five years ago the occupants of your house disappeared inexplicably in the middle of dinner. There were several articles in the _Prophet_ and an MLE investigation that led nowhere—Remus, if you are free today, you might head up to London and see what you can find in the archives—but it has been occupied several times since then with no apparent issue. I do wonder at the timing.”

“You think it’s something dark,” said Remus, a horrible acid edge in his voice, “and you _knew_.”

“I think it is one of many things, my dear boy. Certainly if it is dark it would be of profound interest and I daresay use to our enemy. I will check back this evening and the same time tomorrow morning if it suits you gentlemen.”

“It’s not like we have a choice,” said Sirius.

“On the contrary, Sirius. We always have a choice,” said Dumbledore, infuriatingly, just as Remus switched off the Floo and they stood up with soot in their hair.

“Well I guess I’m going to London,” said Remus. They looked at each other, angry and scared and exhausted with nauseous adrenaline but together. Sirius had ash on his cheek and his black jeans and Remus wiped at it with the sleeve of his flannel. “I’ll meet you back here at four?”

“Afraid to leave me alone for like ten minutes after work?”

“Please. Like you’re not thinking the same thing. I can _hear_ you, you’re so loud.”

Over his dead body would he leave Remus alone in the house but of course it didn’t need saying. He threaded his arms around Remus’s waist and reeled him in by the belt loops, dragging their mouths together in a hard kiss, feeling Remus’s lips open against his in a slow bloom and flicking his tongue between the wet slide of them. “Fuck this bullshit,” he said when they’d pulled apart long enough to share a breath. In his arms Remus laughed and flowed against him like a willow branch, rubbing his mouth against Sirius’s unshaven jaw.

“Brave man,” said Remus. “All I want is to get in bed with you and sleep all day and maybe get takeout for dinner.”

“You realize some malevolent murderous whatever stole your Joan Baez records.”

“Maybe it’ll be inspired to take up a cause,” said Remus. “Suppose I ought to get some Christmas shopping done anyway. Could you pick up some curry on your way home? Or falafel, or both.”

At four o’clock with the sun bleeding low into the wooly clouds he Apparated to the end of the lane loaded down with takeout and the brittle winter dusk getting through his red-patterned Pendleton coat like needles as he walked up to where Remus was sitting on the rock wall staring back at the relentless eye on the lake, holding several sheets of Xeroxed pages presumably containing evidence of and potential solutions to their haunting and/or malicious curse and/or dark magic landmine, and when he saw Sirius he got up and kissed his cold lips and Sirius put his hand presumptuously in the back pocket of his jeans. Everything was quiet here in a way that had at first been hard to get used to after the marvelous music of the city, but he’d fallen in love with it at once the same way he had with their flat when they both laid awake those first June-warm nights thrumming with the newness of it; Remus pressed into him while he dug his keys out and he recalled like a scent the memory of the shack in the winter, seventh year, the snow blowing in under the door and articulated chain of Remus’s spine underneath the blanket, his head in Sirius’s lap and all the hairs on the back of his neck standing up underneath his palm while the pale sunbeams slanted through the bars catching the dust in the air, and Sirius loved him worse than anything. Of late he’d wondered if they could have anything like that again, the sweet unknowing holiness of it, free of the choking overhang of pain and loss and horror.

Still entertaining random flashes of memory he opened the door and felt his insides go to ice and spread in tandem through both of them at the threshold. Every single light in the house was on and when they went together into the kitchen they found both places at the table set elegantly; in the middle was the milk glass cake stand Remus had inherited from his mother and never once used. Candles had been lit at both ends dripping wax onto the oak and in the darkening daylight it felt like they’d walked into a wake.

“Hate to let it go to waste but it’s too early to eat,” said Sirius. Neither of them laughed. It took them another hour to find the note on the coffee table, written in a steady, blocky hand: _You trespass._

They sat on the couch with food they couldn’t eat in the refrigerator and waited for Dumbledore to Floo, listening to the moment crawl on and on and on until it began to feel abstract and finally they had to get up to close the curtains. Inside it felt like the world was ending; outside it had begun to snow.

—

A brief history of the collision:

Just after the full moon in November ’78 they went to a pub to see Wire in the freezing autumn rain. The show was good: loud and tearing-raw in places, cold and crisp and unsweet as champagne. During “Used To” someone jostled Sirius sideways into Remus— _Does the pain remain when the head is turned and the body walks away_ —who pressed back into him in the fluorescent haze, and then again, hip to hip, like he was trying to sniff something out; he was wearing an ink-stained flannel shirt over a t-shirt that had been washed so many times it was nearly translucent, wiry wheaty-red hair catching the gauzy light. He was staring dead ahead and he looked strangely ageless and handsome, but then Sirius thought Remus looked handsome when he was lying in front of the toilet at three a.m. making doom prophesies with dirty hair and cigarette ash smeared on his crooked nose. A shiver like a heartbeat murmured through the wires of his body, searing drumbeat red unfurling, spreading into Remus or maybe spreading from Remus into himself, making both of them sway; if they turned towards each other they could almost pretend they were dancing.

When it was over, they got a table near the back and Remus brought them a bottle of whiskey with two tumblers, his foot knocking into Sirius’s boot underneath the table when he sat back down. His mouth was parted just slightly showing the very knifeblade edges of his incisors over the place where he’d bitten through his bottom lip in the moon-bursting a few days previous, his face unusually open, unfogging. “Wish I could change the song,” he said, jerking his head towards where the speakers were playing Jefferson Starship and then closing his mouth, as if it wasn’t at all what he really wanted to say.

The problem with love was that it had so many monstrous ways to blind you. In the beginning, desperate and devouring, it rips away your safety net and forces you into the vast wilderness of the unknown and the unmapped, arms outstretched as you stumble into the endless static anything, strung along on a tightrope compulsion by the ineluctable heartbeat-pulse in your ears: _I-love, I-love, I-love-you_. The feeling itself—the finger’s-grip on the cliffside, the holy yearning haunting your body like a ghost—was such that Sirius would have worshipped the thunder-crush totality of his obsession whether Remus ever loved him or not, would have made himself a living sacrifice to the divine theremin thrum of his own heartbeat, his very soul crucifix and wafer and wine to the hallowed thrall of the pleasure and the pain to which he would give himself over like a self-made martyr, blinded by the entirety of his surrender.

But if you are lucky—if you are very very very truly indescribably unspeakably lucky—you are both reaching out in the dark for the very same thing, drawn indelibly towards each other like magnetic north, like blood spilled, like the song of a second heartbeat calling you anywhere. Later Remus would also liken it to a fork shoved into an electrical outlet, and that was true too if far less romantic, but for better or for worse, in sickness and in death and in life, they were headed in the same direction: no past without each other, no future that was not together. In the dark, blind and off-footed but in love with the feeling of it like music or magic or blood, Sirius stretched out a hand.

“You know, if you wanted to pull now would be a good time to do it,” he said, “given all the excess sexual energy, I mean. It’d take about thirty seconds given that it feels like the heat-collapse of a galaxy or something in here.”

Remus just blinked his green eyes a few times. “Is that really what you’re thinking about. Fucking?”

“One of us has to.”

“Good one,” said Remus, not laughing. He started picking at the old black blood underneath his fingernails. “Keep them out of the fridge this time, the last one ate my curry.”

“Hypothetically I mean,” said Sirius, powering through despite Remus’s sneering best efforts, “ _if_ you wanted to pull. If you—hypothetical you—were going to pick someone up you could have them flat on their backs in the eight seconds it took to Apparate back home, or bent over something, however it is _you_ do it. Why don’t you roll that up in your fucking cigarette and smoke it.”

Remus just kept rolling his cigarette on the table and mumbled something that sounded distinctly like _asshole_ but with enough breathy deniability to have also been a covert warming charm. Sirius pretended extremely magnanimously not to hear.

“So,” he said, “good show.”

“Probably the best I’ve seen all year.”

“A while back a friend of mine saw this band Swell Maps—he said it was one of the most revelatory musical experiences of his life thus far, like hearing some kind of apocalyptic version of what the future’s going to sound like in about fifteen years, it was all very poetic but he was also stoned out of his mind at the time.”

At that Remus looked up, frowning almost audibly, licking along the side of his paper and pressing it in place with his thumb. “ _I_ saw them,” he said slowly. “And it wasn’t the pot, it was like a fist in my gut the whole time sort of wringing me out with this scorched inevitability, or something. This was better but I know you’d like them too if you saw them.”

“Yeah? Sounds like the kind of thing we’d both like,” said Sirius, leaning slightly towards Remus, who by then was staring at him with the unlit cigarette between his lips and his face straddling some no man’s land between concerned irritation and bewildered disbelief. “Here—”across the table he reached up and cupped a hand around Remus’s cheek, summoning flint and tinder into his fingers like a match-light born of pure intrinsic desire as shattering as any magic. In the lightning-shock of it he held Remus’s eyes, a wide stunned cloudburst breaking across his face; Sirius thought he could almost see himself in them, the murmur of the flame, the bite of his own stare. When he took his hand away Remus tried to say “Thank you” which came out terribly mangled with the cigarette still in his mouth, apparently forgotten altogether in the heat of it and nearly landing in his lap.

“Thanks,” said Remus, again, after helpfully taking it out from between his lips.

“I never tried to roll my own. Seemed like too much trouble.”

“It’s not hard.”

“Maybe you can show me,” he said. “You here by yourself?”

Remus was still staring at him with his mouth open again as if his jaw had come slightly unglued, unblinking as Sirius fixed him with his eyes from across the table like his heart wasn’t squeezing like a hangman’s noose in his throat. A brittle moment later Remus seemed to decide that reality, for whatever it was worth, had been suspended, or else he was having a stroke; something was unwinding on his face that made Sirius think of sunlight lancing through the curtains in his bedroom, waiting to be split wide open. He had never wanted anything in all his life with such suffocating conviction. “Yeah,” said Remus, finally, “I live just over in Kentish Town.”

“So do I,” said Sirius, “right above a shitty bar. Let me get you another drink.”

“Alright,” said Remus. Sirius could feel his eyes following him to the bar and back like a spell unscrolling in the night air, catching on the light with the smoke and the rainwater trailing down the windows. When he got back Remus still hadn’t looked away and he had the impression of nakedness, or more than nakedness, his organs showing through his skin and the starved yearning thing separating from his blood like black oil from water, but still he sat back down and slid Remus’s whiskey across the table to him and held his eyes when Remus, again, caught them and pinned him there, like a moth to a cork board.

“You said you live in Kentish Town?” Sirius asked.

“Right above a shitty bar, incidentally. I’m not actually from here. London, I mean.”

“I’d guess West Country? Your accent,” said Sirius, smiling, feeling the edges of his incisors pull over his bottom lip, “you’re definitely a country boy. I’d have remembered you.”

“Liar. How many people have you said that to? Probably at least half of everyone you’re trying to pull.”

In fact Sirius had said it to a few people he’d tried to pull and it was possible Remus had even heard him do it on one of their spontaneous trips to see terrible bands at cheap Camden pubs. “I’ve never meant it before,” he said, which was true enough. “But I am absolutely trying to pull you so you’re half-right.”

“Going by that logic I’m at least seventy-five percent right.”

“There’s a war on, you know, so while you go on and on about your missed calling as an accountant of all my grievous sexual sins or whatever we could be dead in ten minutes flat. Theoretically.”

“So I’m just supposed to lie back and make it easy for you,” said Remus. There was something on his face that wanted to be a smile, an icepick-tremble of longing caught between the idea and the fact; Sirius watched the tight thread of it ripple across his mouth, wanting, wanting. “Am I running behind schedule in your head or what?”

“I’m trying to make it easy for _you_. But for the record—for what it’s worth, I could do this forever,” he said, leaning closer, “I could obsess over it for fucking years if you play it just right, and I’ll keep coming back to this pub and the rain in your hair and the way you keep looking at me like you’re starving to death every single time I get myself off. Really I think I’ve gotten off to you for a long time now, or the idea of you, like a kind of premonition before I ever even saw you in here. I knew what you looked like. I could hear you, almost, in the music, like hearing my own heartbeat.”

By now Remus was breathing a little fast and rolling another cigarette immediately after snuffing out his other in the filthy ashtray. “You’re a little bit crazy,” he said. 

“I could’ve just told you I was getting shipped to the frontlines of fuck-off nowhere tomorrow morning and it would mean so much.”

“Are you sure I’ve never met you before? I feel like I’ve known you—”

“Forever,” said Sirius.

“Yes. Yes, it’s, I don’t know, this elemental apotheosis. Cosmic inevitability vis-à-vis two bodies in motion. Or possession—maybe that, above anything else. Possession of some otherwise unconquerable part of my soul, like a living ghost. It’s always been you. I can feel you in my rib-rungs. I swear to you my heart picked up when it heard your voice. My spine-rungs knew you, they missed you, I can feel it—your voice shaking up the back of my neck like a song I heard a long time ago.”

“You’re a little bit crazy,” said Sirius. “It’s sexy. You are.”

A little too suddenly the song changed to “I Wanna Sleep in Your Arms,” which prompted Remus to turn around and stare at the corner of the ceiling where the speakers were, seemingly to sniff out any leftover spell wisps hanging in the rafters. “That’s unexpected but at least it’s not ‘Wild Horses.’”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Sure.”

“Maybe it’s that cosmic inevitability you were talking about. Don’t you feel like we’ve known each other forever?”

“How’s that song go? We’ve known each other in past lives and so on.”

“If there are parallel universes out there I’d want you in every single one,” said Sirius, and finally Remus’s smile broke across his face, a slow rose-bloom spread of his mouth and his eyes like a warm sepia photograph; Sirius leaned even closer, moth to flame, north to south, yearning to yearning. In the honeyed glare of the smoke and the streetlights outside he knew he probably looked like some black-sheep bastard son in the back pages of the _Prophet_ , lean and hungry with a taste for orgies and too much coke. He could feel more than hear Remus’s breath sharpening over the rim of his tumbler. “You’ve always been here, just out of reach. I’d be trying to pull you on Mars or on the Tube or the Arctic tundra or the wasteland at the end of the world. I’d put on the Doors for you then, though. If we were friends before this—say we lived together maybe—I’d probably leave my door open some nights and think of you at the other end of the hallway. You’d be the first thing I thought of before I went to sleep, I’d just lie there thinking of you in bed with every last sexual impulse I’ll ever have—it’ll all run screaming back into you like it always has.”

“I have the new Kate Bush at my flat,” said Remus, in a dream. “If you want to come. My roommate has some good gin.”

Kiss me, Sirius was thinking, come on, come on, do it, kiss me kiss me kiss me. With his knuckles he brushed the very edge of Remus’s wrist underneath the hem of his flannel where he knew the exact shape of the dog’s-tooth scar that crowned his wrist in a vicious wreath of tearing white. “Every one of these,” he said, close close close, everything else faded out, like they were the only two people in the world, pressed inextricably together between the closed pages of a book, “every one you’ve got. I want to put my mouth on every one of these.”

“Do you want to walk home with me or should I Apparate us or,” said Remus. God, his eyes. He looked unreal, his mouth red where he’d been biting it, green-gold of his wild stare like some infernal angel offering up his soul for vivisection. Sirius swallowed something rabid with his whiskey that tasted vaguely of blood and may have been his heart, burning searingly all the way down.

“I think you’d better,” he said. Then he got up and headed for the door remembering jarringly that there were other people in the world entirely unaware of the new electrifying earthquake-tremor in the fabric of the universe; they were drinking and laughing or staring into space and picking at old cherished wounds and someone had started playing XTC like nothing had happened at all. Outside in the greenblack pea-soup fog Sirius felt Remus dig his fingernails into his wrist and the ground dropped out beneath him until the night resolved itself seconds later in the unlit, enchanted dark of their flat, his knees buckling as they both stumbled against the kitchen counter and kind of ricocheted off each other ungracefully, rattling the dishes drying in the rack when they peeled apart.

They had brought the cold in with them as well as whatever golden unearthly magic they had summoned together in the pub, the heartbeat of it spider-veined around them, miraculous and smothering with might. This is the part where, Sirius thought, and found he couldn’t finish it for the way Remus was looking at him, his cheeks pink and his mouth open again and his hands held out slightly feeling keenly their own emptiness, hunger in the hollow of his throat and his cheeks for what he could never ask for, for what Sirius could never take, and he felt himself tremble slightly before the enormity of it in the darkness like a thief come to a holy place, almost, almost reverent. At some point his mouth had gone dry.

“The gin’s on top of the fridge in case you forgot,” he said. Everywhere they weren’t touching he could feel the cold getting in, winter in his mouth, midnight in his empty hands. In the thrumming static spell of it Remus took an uncertain step forward.

“Sirius,” he said, all breath. “Am I, is this—do you even really—”

“I just spent probably an hour telling you I want to get you off and you’re still doing sexual calculus in your head. If you don’t really want to then just fucking say so, alright? We’ll never talk about it again and you can pretend it never happened like you do with everything else and in six months we probably won’t speak to each other anymore because one of us is a coward and it’s not me. Sound good?”

“Fuck you,” said Remus, having obviously wanted to say it for a while, which Sirius probably deserved, “just, shut the fuck up, you have no idea about anything that isn’t _you_ and what you want in this very moment and I don’t know if you even,” he made a noise that sounded almost painful and yanked a hand through his hair, “if you want this. If you are really, truly—in this, beyond right now.”

“Either you’ve been too busy doing your martyr thing to notice anything at all or you’ve got a hugely lower opinion of me than I realized.”

Part of that hypothetical opinion was valid and he knew it, at least on a molecular building-block level where the sometimes-obliviousness intersected with the sometimes-horrific and costly carelessness, but at least he reckoned (uncharitably) that he had the self-awareness to recognize it where Remus could never see the same of himself. “I don’t know what you want,” said Remus, raw-hearted, and reached out as if blinded and took Sirius’s wrist in his fist where the blue skip of the pulse reverberated against his thin fingers, like a flame cupped in his hand.

“I wish you’d stop worrying,” he said, “I just want you to stop worrying about every little thing or whether it’s perfect or it’s ever going to be perfect or if the world’s going to fall off its fucking hinges. I don’t care if it does. Moony.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Moony, look. You’ve got me right where I want me. What are you going to do about it.”

Remus backed him into the stove and threw every ounce of his height and weight and not-inconsiderable strength—he was maybe an inch shorter than Sirius at most and Sirius was tall—into a kiss that would likely have bent Sirius backwards if it hadn’t been for the stovetop behind him. Their arms tangled thrillingly until Remus unwound them and threaded his fingers through Sirius’s hair, pulling gently, his teeth biting a crenelated bruise into Sirius’s bottom lip; Sirius’s palms spread flat-out across the fact of him, his belly and his skinny hips, the swelling of the breath in his lungs, the pulse running red like something just lit, door opening, dam bursting. When they pulled apart he was stroking his thumbs over Remus’s cheekbones, watching Remus watching him, their bitten-bruised lips, their yearning hands. There was blood in his mouth, his own or Remus’s.

“What,” he said, and they both startled with the heat kicked on, laughing. He kissed Remus again, dizzy-deep, tasting whiskey and the ginger tea he’d been drinking earlier, lavender in his hair, dust and clean cottony sweat on his clothes, every part of them soldered together like a single continuous line sketch. His heartbeat-blood was drumming so hellishly loud in his chest against Remus’s he could hardly tell them apart anymore. “Aren’t you gonna take me to bed?”

“Yours. I want to be in your bed,” said Remus, showing his throat like he wanted Sirius to bite down, so he did, thin moon-pale skin bruising rosebud-dark underneath his tongue where he could feel the voice and the heart and the breath, “oh God—you have no idea. You think you do but you don’t,” he said, trailing off with his mouth open, his breath stuttering staccato.

Just outside Sirius’s bedroom he shoved Remus against the wall after they went stumbling against the hallway table where they kept an overflow of records and books strewn with shopping lists and old mail and incoherent notes for illegal research and/or each other that usually continued like a breadcrumb trail on the kitchen table; in the deepening dark Sirius ran his hands down Remus’s sides and squeezed his ass, making him gasp and feeling altogether insanely proud of himself until Remus slotted their hips together and dug his fingers into Sirius’s lower back and then down to his ass, orchestrating their movement. Kinetic-electric, wave upon wave. Remus sucked the join of his neck and jawline as Sirius undid his fly, sliding his palm up the thin warm skin of his belly and down again into the slim trail of corkscrew-hair leading into his underwear where he could feel the outline of Remus’s cock pressing against his own, hard in his jeans.

“Remember when we shared the bed when we moved in,” he said, hips moving, pleasure tightening tidal and foggy; Remus’s hands were up his shirt, settling like birds in the spaces between his ribs. “I used to wake up in the night and think about fucking you stupid while you were six inches away from me. Just—just touching you. Just once.”

“Should’ve woken me up,” said Remus. His eyelids were fluttering because Sirius was working his jeans down his thighs, very slowly, and brushed his knuckles one-two-three-four against his cock in his underwear. “I’d have let you do anything. Every weird thing I know you want to do. All of it.”

On the bed Remus pulled him down like some priceless relic as if he was afraid of going too fast and getting the bends, searching, both of them naked, Sirius feeling split open and connected to Remus like his own soul in every part of his body from his mouth to his groin to Remus’s ankle hooked around the backs of his knees. Hours seemed to pass by in every languid underwater movement—his throat, the secret nautilus-curl of Remus’s spine, the streetlight from the window where he hadn’t closed the curtains—though it couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes before he looked at Remus poured out beneath him, the ancient tearing scar around his left side grown over him like ivy, the scattered freckles across his nose and shoulders, the bruises Sirius had sucked on his belly and thighs and rising on the inside of his bent knee, and pulled him up into his lap, straddling his hips. Again Remus’s breath stuttered and he stared down with a feral hunger, reaching for Sirius’s cock until Sirius drug his tongue across the silver-thin scar running through a nipple and pushed it away when Remus’s whole body jumped like a live-wire.

“Wait,” he said into Remus’s chest, his hands on the backs of Remus’s thighs and his ass slick with sweat. “Just wait, wait—not yet.”

“Did you think I was joking,” said Remus, fingernails digging dark stinging weals into his shoulders, “I really have wanted this in some part of me forever in past lives and the infernal unconsummation of my soul screaming until I get it et cetera and I swear I’ll set your bed on fire if you don’t do it.”

Sirius had his thumbs in the soft shadowed divots above Remus’s hips and wasn’t sure he would have noticed or cared if the bed was on fire; in fact he was certain the world could fall off its axis, vexed to nightmare and then some, and it wouldn’t have mattered because he could not see anything beyond Remus, the only other living person in the world, a vein of sheer gold above and around him, the magic they’d spun of their own unraveling smothering desire. He crept his hand down and wrapped it around Remus’s cock, stroking him slowly, a long molten drag along the length of it, blood-warm and heavy in his palm. Remus pressed his face into the junction of his neck and shoulder and bit down in a rough open-mouthed kiss when Sirius twisted his wrist hard, thumb pressing up underneath the head, making the marvelous machinery of him shake like an autumn leaf down deep.

“Sirius,” Remus was saying—pleading maybe, except Sirius had never heard him beg for a thing in his life, not forgiveness or love or pleasure or belonging. He’d wrapped his hand around Sirius’s, moving in time but trying to urge him faster every time Sirius’s thumb stroked a thrilling arc over the slick head of his cock, and Sirius could feel all the wires of him honed to a fine crescendo as he brushed over his slit, Remus’s heartbeat between his teeth where he’d pressed his mouth to his chest again, sucking something bright. “Come on, come on—”

Some part of him folded away deep in a submarinean layer of his brain still could not quite believe his luck—that Remus wanted him, that he wanted Sirius to see him like this—and as such he recalled a bare thread of the embarrassingly impotent and obsessive longing that kept him up nights, feeling stoned and possessed in some unalterable piece of his soul dreaming voraciously of what he would give Remus if he could, what he would feed him, all the things he would do if if if like a turntable skipping infinitely on all the most torturously sexual riffs. He surged up and shoved Remus back onto the bed, which lasted about three seconds as Remus rose up on an elbow and grabbed Sirius’s shoulders, trying to hold him there; he did not stick where he was pushed, a new development that Sirius found almost indescribably sexy as he tugged his arm out of Remus’s hand to run his palms up the backs of his thighs and down again, watching the rubber-band vibrations of his belly sharpening in a desperate tuneless chord.

“You’re so,” he said, Remus’s long rack-stretched limbs and his skin lit underneath him, looking like he was in thrall, “Remus.” Fine quiver of his muscles when Sirius hooked his hands under his bent knees and pulled him closer down the bed, lifting up on his elbows to watch Sirius settle between his legs.

With his eyes still watching Remus’s he leaned down and flicked his tongue over the tip of Remus’s cock, again, again, thumb stroking slowly underneath as he took just the head into his mouth, pulling off until it slid off his bottom lip. Remus made a sound like he’d just been punched and Sirius sank down deeper, swallowing around him while Remus grabbed a sweaty fistful of his hair and slid a shaky thumb over Sirius’s eyebrow. Again he pulled back slowly, feeling the warm wet-silk weight of his cock on his tongue and sliding against the inside of his cheek, dragging only his lips around the tip and pressing his tongue over the slit before he sucked it deeper, one hand stroking Remus into his mouth; it was almost like ritual in the swallowing oneness of it, like worship, like becoming. Blood and sex and history, summoning the spell; holiest desire, driving out everything else.

“Oh— _fuck_ , Sirius, I’m,” Remus said, thighs squeezing, “ _Sirius_ ,” tight and hoarse, thought it was more an incantation than a warning, knuckles and nails, teeth teeth teeth. 

Around his cock Sirius hummed, feeling the pulse of it hard against his lips; with his tongue he darted underneath the tip of it over and over and Remus came, a hot wet spread he swallowed until he pulled off entirely, his hand stroking slowly until he felt Remus soften, a drop of come trailing a snow-melt down to his fist. He had about six seconds to feel smug before Remus shoved him down by the shoulders and touched him, kneeling between his legs; it took five strokes of Remus’s hand around his cock before he came so suddenly and so thunderously hard it almost hurt, undertow breaking, the sweet sonic melt spilling through his belly and his cock and pulsing to his toes. When he finished Remus was breathing heavily over him, trying to say something but instead pressed them together by the mouths, and Sirius felt it settle like a living thing down his throat and into the indestructible meat of his soul like a dream-memory on the bed, which with the sheets and the blankets kicked down and spun around looked like an open door to something from which they could never—would never—come back.

Once they’d cleaned up and started to feel their skin prickle with the chill Sirius lit a candle and they ate cheese and crackers and salami in bed with the blanket and the afghan pulled up close, feeling wide open and peeled raw, new to the world and to each other in all the places of themselves where they’d been. It was actually physically difficult to stop kissing Remus; Sirius would be halfway through a sentence or thinking about getting up to piss and would lose the thought completely to the compelling bone-ridge of his shoulder, or the hollow of his throat, or the open press of his mouth which was very soft and red in the coffeestain of the candlelight like blood on new snow. His heart was only just slowing in his chest, as if it had been slammed back into him after an out-of-body experience and more than once he put a hand out to brace himself on the edge of the bed to hang on as tightly to the slim golden thread of it as he could, Remus’s fingers splayed over his ribs like a wraith after lost souls, which Sirius would’ve gladly forfeited to him for the feeling alone.

“I never slept well in this bed,” Remus said into his shoulder, his nose and his mouth and all his wiry hair pressed into Sirius. He didn’t think they could ever be uncoupled.

“Too much stress on the system?”

“God, you’re a dog. But yes. You were right there and I was having these intense sex dreams about you like I was a goddamn thirteen-year-old kid.”

“How long has that been going on?”

“Basically forever,” said Remus, laughing brittly. Way up high on his neck Sirius had left a mark which he kissed again when Remus arched his neck like he was asking for it. “It was torture with you right there though. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and wonder if I could will you to wake up and kiss me with magic or otherwise but it never worked.”

“And ‘forever’ means…?”

“Christ, Padfoot. Since I was probably twelve. I wanted you to be my consuming sexual awakening in the forest and the empty classrooms and the dorm and the shack and happily ever after, you know how it goes. I used to lay awake nights thinking about it and all that entails if you want to go there with your one-track mind, it was all very screamingly homoerotic really, like a Waugh novel but with explicit jerking off behind the bedcurtains. Sometimes I worried you could tell.”

“Too absorbed in your own tragedy to wonder if I was thinking the same thing.”

“Maybe so,” said Remus. He pressed a soft smiling kiss to Sirius’s temple. “Make me a mixtape about it.”

“It’d have to be an anthology. Like at least one whole tape with just ‘Black Dog’ for an hour somewhere in the middle.”

“‘Search and Destroy’ at least once. Possibly ‘Gloria’ as a closer on Volume Two, right.” They laughed whisperingly and then stretched together like taffy, shifting tectonically in an irresistible arc painted in a conjoined landscape shadow on the far wall. “I want to hear every detail.”

“Have you ever known me to withhold anything once I know I can say it?”

“Fair enough,” said Remus. “In that case you must know I used to wear your clothes to see Dearborn on purpose. I thought about you eating yourself alive with jealousy kind of like a collapsed star fueled on its own sexual spite.” They laughed, kissing again, and settled back into each other as Sirius reckoned they had been trying to do for a very long time.

“You know I’ve had to pee for twenty minutes,” said Sirius, not moving at all.

“Me too.”

That was love, he supposed: going outside in the driving rain and finding that it was a bit warmer than he expected. Waking up and thinking _Remus Remus Remus_ like a wish, hearing his name in every song, seeing it discreetly in the architecture of the whole waking world. Having to piss for twenty minutes and not caring for anything but the hypnotic solidity of another breathing body in his arms.

For the rest of the weekend they hardly bothered with clothes and didn’t leave the flat, engaged in the kind of hedonistic fucking Sirius had only fantasized about from a great distance and had questioned the possibility thereof until that Friday night with Remus and the midnight hush and the thousand ways they had fit together, the newborn feeling of it manifesting as a kind of ecstatic invasion of each other, as though they had been overtaken and sunk together to the bottom of themselves and would never again come out. Remus made grilled cheeses wearing only his plaid boxers and Sirius’s sweater and seemed to take extreme if veiled pleasure in the knowledge that Sirius was watching him with a keen starvation from across the room; they listened to Magazine and Suicide and Squeeze and more Wire and the new Kate Bush album, dancing around the living room stoned in the afternoons to “Roadrunner” and “Moonage Daydream.” They watched _Upstairs, Downstairs_ and _Alfred Hitchcock Presents_ and filled in the crosswords in the _Prophet_ with obscenities, ignored the Floo, tried hilariously to perk up the marijuana plants they were attempting to grow in the hallway closet, read each other choice excerpts from the _Quibbler_ regarding the proper steps to take if one suddenly laid an egg ( _Immaculate Egg-ception: It Happened to Me!!!_ ), made rich potato-leek soup and curry and drank honey-thick hot chocolate with chili in bed and stayed up half the night talking and making love, full of each other.

In the end, Remus’s sexual wheelhouse galvanized them to new highs first: on Sunday evening he drug the blue afghan from the couch onto the kitchen floor (the tile was freezing) and put his hands up Sirius’s shirt, and as such they fucked so loudly on the unyielding cold-iron of it that Sirius was sure they would get suspicious looks from the neighbors on the stairs when at last they ventured outside, fingerprint-bruised and sore. They made love for what felt like days; he felt bound to Remus by body and spirit and spell in their flat, where the universe became their bed or the couch or whatever space contained their own beating hearts and any moment not spent there seemed a miserable waste.

Early Monday morning, when they finally left—Sirius to work in Southwark, Remus to meet with Dumbledore concerning what was likely a perilously dangerous but hopefully paid undercover endeavor—they were both shocked upon stumbling together into the gloomy-grey London rainlight that the world outside their bodies and their flat still existed, turning and turning, unaware and uncaring that they were the only shipwrecked survivors left on earth, and they had fallen in love. At least have the decency to fucking get the gales up, Sirius thought before he ducked into an alley to Apparate, and then proceeded to spend all day thinking of nothing but Remus and their unmade bed and the difference between Friday morning and Monday—the distance between one thing and another—which he had realized suddenly was barely a fingernail’s breadth.

At the end of the day they came back to each other. The deathless mantra: they came back to each other. Again and again and again they found each other anywhere, had always, would always, smothered or lost or beaten bloody or wounded or unforgiven or hated or loved, they came back to each other, stretched umbilical beneath the years and the miles in a unbreakable centrifugal ley line leading them always to each other like the magic from which everything else was born. They came back to each other. They came back to each other.

—

It wasn’t long before everything went to hell, which could’ve been the leading sentence in both of their autobiographies and probably their obituaries too. For the next two weeks they became accustomed to waking in the middle of the night to strange sounds ranging from a deathly murmur in the other room to frenzied banging on the walls to a scratching in the ceiling like something was dragging itself along the rafters. Horrifyingly one afternoon when they were pretending they weren’t experiencing a violent haunting and/or living on an oil well of dark magic they’d started a fire and Remus had put on _Led Zeppelin IV_ , perhaps in an attempt to defuse the general terrible shittiness or perhaps because he was feeling the sexual lack as acutely as Sirius was, and as they were wrapping up a package to send McKinnon and Meadowes (cheap vodka and the Kleenex EP) they both had the sensation at the exact same moment that the walls were breathing, that they were made of muscle and pulse, as if they were sitting in the belly of a living thing struggling to slouch forward on monstrous feet. They had fled the house together, tugging each other along by the hands, but they had the same faint feeling of lifeness outside in the land throbbing under their feet; it was a while before it stopped and when they ventured back inside the record was shuffling over at the end of the side, the fire nearly dead as they sat down feeling like they’d just had the worst acid trip ever had by anyone. The boathouse glowered as ever from the front windows when Sirius shut the curtains; in the blood of sunset he thought he saw something ripple in the water.

Lily had come to visit on a Wednesday when James was working late, offering to let them stay in what was going to be the baby’s room if they’d like; she wasn’t yet showing and when she had told them all over her sad glass of San Pellegrino in an Islington pub before the slapdash wedding last month Sirius had exchanged what he hoped was a surreptitious glance with Remus as both of them tried to gauge whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. Truth be told they still weren’t sure.

“I was looking forward to meeting it,” she said after she’d been there for about an hour and nothing had happened. “You make this place sound like the gate of hell itself and here we are standing around the woodstove drinking and being merry. Lupin, you can stay over there if you’re going to have whiskey in front of me.”

“We could try one of those séance things,” said Sirius. “The Muggle kind with the weird magnetic glass.”

Remus laughed and Sirius found himself smiling too; after weeks of locking themselves in the heart of the beast every night they were almost exultant at having someone else in the house. Save Dumbledore and Lily they couldn’t get anyone to come over. “Those are a scam, you know that.” Sirius did know and preferred the ritual of the magical equivalent but had always been sort of morbidly fascinated with them anyway, except when the Muggles stumbled on the real thing and ended up driven mad or hanging from the walls in pieces. “Remember fifth year, when James wanted to do one after that unit in Muggle Studies? You kept moving the, the thing, so he thought something was actually after his mortal soul or whatever—”

“—And he told Selina Feinstein he was being hunted by Muggle ghosts that wanted to fry his wizard soul at the stake, and then she—um—”

“Cracking good tale, lads,” said Lily, very loudly. “The man in question sends warm tidings of course but regrettably couldn’t be here to act shocked that his Christmas Past just can’t stay buried like he wants.”

For the last month or so James had been a bit awkward around them, which Sirius supposed was part and parcel of his being unable to pretend he didn’t know what was going on between them any longer, if indeed that was what he did; it was not so much the old discomfort but more that he seemed unsure how to broach the subject or whether he even should, and at times he treated the whole thing like a big joke they wouldn’t let him in on, looking between the two of them when they were in the same room and waiting for the punchline, which rankled badly. Nonetheless he knew it would be fine; Peter though had been avoiding them and they’d both adopted a fuck-off kind of outlook towards it all unless he came around, but after nearly nine years of shared everything it still stung. The things we fixate on when we could all be dead by the end of the year, Sirius thought.

“Speaking of tidings. Dumbledore came through the Floo earlier and said he wanted to talk to you about something when we saw you, you could see about it while you were at work this week and it’s definitely not dangerous et cetera. Just Floo him when you get home,” Sirius said to Lily, whose dagger-green eyes darkened.

“I wonder what it’s like to get out of school and get on with your life without all the misery hanging over everything. When it’s over I’m not sure I’ll know what the hell to do.”

_When it’s over_ had begun to sound like dearly wishful thinking, but still they clung to it because it was the thinning thread upon which they’d hung all their hopes; when you ripped the bottom out of that nothing was left and you forgot why you even bothered. “Make the hugest fry-up you’ve ever seen. Buy an eighth of weed. Have champagne for lunch. Never get out of bed before noon for at least a month.”

“Lie on the floor of our new flat and/or house laughing about all this shit from a fuckoff huge distance,” said Remus.

“You know how to motivate a girl,” said Lily. “But by the time I have this baby I’m not sharing any of my alcohol or my drugs or my food for a good month. Get your own.”

When they walked her down the end of the lane to the Apparition point she was looking out towards the lake with her brow furrowed when the wind picked up and the moaning started. They’d first heard it a few days ago when they’d come back from the store, thinking it was at first just the wind and realizing with a sickening fever-sweeping dread that it was not: a low, unbroken keening that called to mind a tree falling, seeping up from the frozen ground and spreading through the tree-branch fingers into the cracks in the cottage’s plaster walls. Wherever it was coming from it seemed to be getting louder, and both of them thought it had taken on an angry tenor in the night. Happy fucking Christmas.

“When did that start,” said Lily, looking truly frightened for one of the few times in Sirius’s memory, as if she’d only just realized what was happening. He could tell now as he suspected from the start that she had not been taking any of this seriously.

“Since Sunday afternoon,” said Remus. “There’s no pattern to it, just—all day, all night. Probably while we’re gone during the day too.”

Lily looked at both of them, incredulous and awestruck with fear as the hellish death-wail faded to a guttural subterranean muttering. “How the fuck do you _sleep_.”

“We don’t,” said Sirius.

Indeed they had hardly slept since the day they felt the walls breathing, and they didn’t sleep after Lily left either. They’d tried taking turns in the night, which fell apart two days and a spectacular fight later when they both fell asleep having forgotten whose turn it was and were late to work and a meeting with Dumbledore, respectively; even in sleep they’d taken to keeping their wands close in the bed with them which was likely to kill them before any Death Eater or murderous unworldly hellbeast did, and although the cottage was small—five steps from the couch to the kitchen, eight to the bottom of the ladder to their bedroom—they’d become increasingly uneasy when they were not in the same room, which led to a certain claustrophobic friction and at least four unslept arguments per day, their elbows and hands knocking like sandpaper into shoulders and ribs while they snapped at each other’s heels like dogs with their teeth bared in a snarl. Mornings and nights when they wanted they’d started showering together. After a week of being glued almost literally by the hip Sirius began to feel like he really was living in a Brontë novel: they could not be with each other and they could not be without each other.

Little things had been making both of them angry in a noxious amalgamation of their shitty haunting-by-magic and orders from Dumbledore and work and Christmas and worry worry worry, which he knew they’d both been trying to drown out when they felt it spark before it all exploded in a volcanic Molotov detonation; results so far had been mixed. The sexual frustration was also reaching a lofty summit, and the view from the peak was dearly fucking painful. It had been more than two weeks since they’d had sex, which was what Sirius was thinking of the night before when they were making dinner, watching the narrow strength of Remus’s fingers chop peppers for an easy stir-fry, the artful hollow of his throat, the way the night got in his oldyoung eyes and his mouth from the kitchen window. Their bodies had begun to feel like ghostly mechanical extensions of each other: if he got up to make tea it was because Remus had wanted it, and if Remus put on a record it was because Sirius had willed it, and the thread of thought became theirs. When he looked into the mirror he discovered it had become more and more difficult to hold on to himself; his grey stormglass eyes with their thick lashes became Remus’s, Remus’s mouth became his. It had been so long since they had touched each other with intent.

Just throw it out, he was planning on saying when Remus came back down the ladder from changing his shirt in their bedroom, throw it out or put it in the fridge and let’s rent a room in London, I’ll call in sick tomorrow and we can sleep all day and I’ll fuck you so hard you can’t walk straight and I’ll buy your weight in fish and chips. We can go see a cheap show and walk in Regent’s Park in the snow and we’ll take everything important and if we’re lucky this place will’ve burnt down by the time we get back.

While he was planning how best to seduce Remus body and soul the food had burnt and Remus yelled at him when he came back down and he yelled at Remus and they had depressing cold turkey sandwiches instead while the mantel began to rattle in the living room, where they discovered yet another blocky note with the strange oily ink still wet: _BLOOD FOR BLOOD FOR MAGIC FOR BLOOD FOR DEATH FOR LIFE_. Remus kicked the coffee table so hard the leg came loose and threw it into the woodstove without showing Dumbledore while Sirius torched their copy of the lease with wandless magic and watched it burn with a singular manic satisfaction on the hearth.

Friday after work he was bringing in some wood while Remus tried to focus enough to eviscerate a noise band whose cassette had come with packaging featuring a woman’s naked ass on stark white bathroom tile and lyrics in a similar vein; they’d spent a rare few dreamlike hours last night laughing about it. He was sitting on the couch and didn’t seem to want to get up, but when Sirius came in with the last of it and directed the logs with a spell into the lopsided pile beside the fireplace he had put on _Discreet Music_ and stretched out across half the couch, staring into the fireplace, his notebook abandoned. Walking through the living room to the funeral dirge of it Sirius pretended he was haunting the house himself after having been murdered a decade previous but after a few minutes the stretching spectral echo of it in the house started to saw on his nerves, and he set about making tea very loudly in the kitchen.

“Bit dark for the holidays, don’t you think,” he said from the stove.

“We’re being terrorized by some unseen vengeful hellbeast entity that wants us dead. Does it really matter?”

“That doesn’t mean you need to give it fucking mood music,” said Sirius. He went back to the living room and took the needle off the record and on a vicious, spiteful impulse considered smashing it against the windowpane. Remus was staring at him with his face set into frozen vexation, nests of words in his mouth and his head he wouldn’t say, a burst blood vessel in his eye.

“I was thinking,” said Remus, still looking intently at him as he sat down in the chair to wait for the water to boil, “whatever it is, you know, it probably doesn’t even mean you. If it really is something dark it’d be after my filthy creature blood, right, it’s probably seen me out there on the moors at the full and decided, well, that’s it, time to water the unholy dark breeding ground with his blood.”

Sirius’s head had started to ache deep in his left eye socket; outside he could hear an owl calling from a snow-dusted branch in the blue dark. “And why would you think that.”

“The last note it left. Seems clear to me.”

“That was vague enough it could’ve meant anything.”

Remus blinked at him and sort of smiled in the corner of his mouth, showing teeth. “Of course you would think so because you don’t get it and you never will. You’re like, practically pureblood royalty so you think everything is all about you. But you’ll be just fine.”

“Yes Remus, I’m a hair’s breadth away from joining up with the Death Eaters and their merry marauding blood purist gang. _Brilliant_ deduction Sherlock, that’s just genius, you ripped a hole in the charade and fucked me right through it,” he said, standing, feeling the shards of the dam-burst shatter tearing in his throat, his heartbeat swelling uneven. “Reckon I could do dear old mum proud a few years late? Last time I saw her she said she should’ve had the midwife drown me in the bath but I’m sure she’ll get over it once I complete my first pureblood rite by way of Muggle hunting and show her the new tattoo. Better late than never.”

“In theory you could just walk away from all of this right now. It doesn’t even concern you, it doesn’t affect you, nothing will change for you no matter what else happens,” which was true enough and perhaps he even deserved to hear it. Remus had sat up completely and had the couch cushion in a death grip, the vicious cornered-animal rancor seething in all the live-wires of his body; he was pale and he looked miserable and hunted and Sirius thought he had lost some weight. “Sometimes I think this is just a big fucking joke for you. Like you’ve got nothing at stake so you’ve got to go looking for it, at least until you get tired of it. You’ve got no idea what it’s like.”

“And what do you think this is—” he swept his arm around the matchbox-sized living room where they had strung themselves from corner to corner— “if not something at stake?”

What is everything I love in this scorched hellscape world if not something at stake, he thought furiously, rabid tearing bloody red-raw like a weapon. He didn’t say it.

Remus turned his head back to the fireplace and Sirius followed his stare, watching the flames unblinking until they left burnt-out spots behind his eyes; when he blinked they seemed to move closer. “Something else for you to fuck around with until you get sick of it. Something you wanted and had to have until it breaks because you couldn’t be bothered fixing it. Something familiar and lived-in because everything else is too much.”

He could feel in his gut and in his unquiet heart the tension reeled tight, the fuse lit and hissing away in the spreading shock of it, as if he’d just been slapped. “So do you have an existential crisis every time you fuck me or what.”

“That wasn’t what I meant—”

“You’re saying a fucking lot without _meaning_ anything,” said Sirius, feeling his voice shudder in the walls as he took a heavy step towards Remus on the couch and watched him falter and recoil like a gun; his Black blood, his poison, evil pure and cauterizing as a curse. “Leave if that’s what you want so badly. Take your shit and go find someone who understands every fractured recess of your soul in all the ways I never will because deep down I’m too innately fucked spiritually or whatever to get it. What the hell are you even doing here.”

“You don’t understand—”

“Shut _up_ , Remus, I know you love to hear yourself being vindicated and eternally correct but you’ve made your point like eight times. No one else in the whole wide world has ever suffered or been hurt, and no one understands pain or fear like you do, and no one ever will, and I am incapable by virtue of sheer evil-bloodedness of ever truly loving you. Poor _you_. Does that cover it?”

On the couch Remus sucked in a breath and let it out but said nothing, and in the festering serrated silence the kettle was whistling; when Sirius took it off the stove and poured he could feel the house contract and breathe the way it sometimes did, the plaster whispering in the wind like blood moving through veins, and then the death-wail rattling reaching clawlike through the earth in a hellish chant sung from exhausted lungs. Insanely Sirius threw open the kitchen window to the split red vein of sunset and launched his teacup into the yard, feeling the wind clasp needle-teeth around his wrist and tug. “Fuck you too,” he yelled as he rolled it shut again and went in huge loping strides back into the living room where he yanked on his Doc Martens and his coat while Remus, his face wide and overflowing in increments, finally got up but did not take a step towards him when he wrenched the front door open. Probably the house’s greatest drawback was its lack of doors to slam after a fight, which Sirius hadn’t considered when they signed the lease, though he felt the lack so keenly now that he was sure he’d have seen about getting one put in between the kitchen and the living room had he noticed.

“Where are you going?” asked Remus, his bottom lip raw where he had bitten it; in the bloody rime of sundown his eyes looked like June, Sirius thought, green-gold and yearning. Remus and his emotional solipsism, Remus who never had to nurse anyone’s wounds but his own, Remus who never really apologized or owned up. Sirius loved him like a seething open wound.

“Offering myself up for ritual sacrifice,” said Sirius, and slammed the door with deafening force behind him.

He made it to the end of the lane before the guilt started to wring him out, teeth chattering in the gathering nighttime gloaming; it would snow in the night, he could tell, the air tinny and thick around his neck where he’d left without a scarf. Things got like this sometimes when they cut themselves on each other, a ruinous bleeding thread that once unraveled they could not stop picking at like sutures that had begun to itch; his blood was not Remus’s blood but his possession was perhaps an inexorable twin of Remus’s possession, blood for blood indeed, a ruthless mirror where he knew Remus’s image and all the different men he’d been like he knew the reflection of his very soul. They sank into each other, the eternal echo, the only dream, the sometimes-fever and the always-desire. But sometimes they looked too close and saw too much.

Without thinking he’d walked all the way down to the lakeshore with the ceaseless breath of the wind muttering in the ink-spill of the trees stretched overhead against the bruised sky, his breath unwinding in the glacial-blue wandlight in front of him and his heart beating and beating in the hush of the winter air. He had half-expected Remus to follow him but he never did; it occurred to him belatedly that if Remus decided to wreck anything in the house (which he did sometimes after a fight, and although he almost always had things back in order by the time Sirius came home the blistering violence was obvious in the scuff mark on the wall or the new vinyl to replace the one he’d broken) he’d left all the gifts he’d bought for him a few days ago unwrapped under his side of the bed. Knowing Remus he’d still pretend to be surprised by the weird occult books he’d found at the magic store in the village and the records and the sweater Sirius looked forward to seeing him in and nothing else, even if he knew Sirius knew. At least he’d put the scarf in his sock drawer.

Across the lake the eye of the boathouse watched as ever through the sparse trees like something peeled raw, undimmed by the low fog curling over the cut-glass surface of the water. In the wandlight he found a few flat stones and tried to skip them across the water, which he’d never been very good at; Remus had taught him to do it when they were twelve or thirteen and walking along the river just beyond the Lupin property while James and Peter swam in the pond, and at first Sirius had thought he must be using magic to do it but he wasn’t. He’d waded in with Remus and they held hands against the gentle current with no one there to see, looking for good stones in the silt, and he could remember feeling in the clasp of their sweaty fingers a kind of static sweetness thrumming up against his pulse, beckoning, as if he could reach into the pocket of it and do magic he’d never done before. With the years he’d come to understand that he had loved Remus even then. Sometimes he thought he had loved the idea of Remus years before he ever knew him—the thought of loving his longing for an unmappable someone, like loving all the music he had never heard or all the life he had not yet lived.

Already he was thinking about walking home again as he threw his last stone and watched it skip only twice before it sank; maybe everything would be better if he made them grilled cheeses for dinner. He was looking for one more stone when something caught his eye across the water, more the suggestion of movement than movement itself, and for a moment he thought it was a nightbird flitting through the trees. But when he looked through the gauzy fog towards the boathouse again something was looking back.

At the window was the splatter of a shadow, human-shaped though he couldn’t be sure from the distance and the fog; he watched it, feeling pinned by the back of his neck, his heart hammering down his rib-rungs until he felt like he would be sick, too frightened and too throttlingly shell-shocked to even blink. When he took an unconscious step backwards it jerked harshly towards the glass, as if it was beating its head against the window.

Jesus living fuck. He turned and ran all the way home tripping over his own feet in about twelve seconds flat never once looking over his shoulder, gulping cold air into his straining lungs. When he got to the house he saw Remus was waiting outside with his wand held out at arm’s length, cutting into the fog; when he saw Sirius he threw open the gate and reeled him in, heartbeat to heartbeat, as if he’d been waiting the entire time to feel his arms around him when they found each other again.

“What happened,” Remus asked as Sirius finally dared to look back across the lake and found the windows glowing empty. His whole body felt like jelly. “Are you alright?”

“Shhh,” he said, pressing his face into the crook of Remus’s shoulder and feeling his long fingers fan out and splay spidery across the back of his neck. Like this he thought maybe they could melt into each other or do blood magic. It was the same feeling he often got when they were cradled in the womb of the moon-mornings, the sky emptied of darkness, the pale newborn light and the smell of their sweat and blood and the loam of the earth jangling down his senses while he looked at Remus beside him, wanting with a wild rabid compulsion to lick him clean and carry him home. He wanted Remus to swallow him whole.

Inside they locked the door and pressed together on the couch with tea and some of the Xeroxed papers Remus had brought home from the _Prophet_ archives in London which told them altogether very little of use (the previous tenants had been a Squib man and a witch who had dropped out of Hogwarts early in her sixth year and had seemingly been living mostly as a Muggle; the Aurors had found the front door open, as if they’d let someone inside), listening to the bite of the wind and the Muggle news on the television. Eventually Sirius did get up and made them grilled cheeses on thick wheat bread with avocado and tomato slices, and afterwards they peeled oranges with their fingers in front of the woodstove and ate good dark chocolate while the snow began to fall outside, making a soft kissing sound against the kitchen window. The fear and the exhaustion and the anger all felt very far away suddenly, and they could almost pretend they were as happy as they had wanted to be, talking about what they’d make for Christmas dinner with the snow catching the lights from the tree and the candles lit on the kitchen counter, their bodies entwined in shadow on the far wall.

After a while Remus poured them some whiskey and slid his hand around the inside of Sirius’s knee, stroking his middle finger over and over into the warm curve underneath. Given that it had been well over two weeks by now Sirius felt something alight in his belly almost at the mere suggestion of the touch, like he’d been holding his breath for it without knowing, thinking yes yes yes, fever in it, touch me, why don’t you touch me, heedless of anything else. When would they even get another moment like this with the breaking of the vast fragmenting world? Chances were meant to be taken and when could they be reckless and laughing in the face of death and horror et cetera if not now.

Together they blew out the candles and went one by one up the ladder to their bedroom, where they left the strands of Muggle lights on as they undressed each other slowly. Sirius ran his hands up Remus’s chest, thumbs in his neck feeling for the song of his pulse in the familiar topography of his body; when they kissed it was unhurried, Remus’s mouth chasing him every time Sirius pulled back and let himself be caught again, his lips opening under Remus’s until the pattern shifted and there were hands on either side of his face and his tongue was about halfway down Remus’s throat, feeling him moan in his own mouth. He could feel Remus’s cock half-hard against his thigh and ran his fingers down the waistband of his underwear to stroke him, feeling Remus’s teeth graze his pulse where he was sucking a hot runic imprint against Sirius’s neck; his hips jerked electrically when Sirius rubbed his thumb over his slit, feeling the blood-heavy weight of his cock hardening against his palm. It hadn’t even been three weeks and still the pure match-strike of anticipation spreading in his gut through his chest and his cock and between his thighs made his mouth go dry, as did Remus, naked on the bed with all the pieces of him spilled out on the sheets, compulsion in his eyes and the heartbeat running wild wild wild in his throat.

Remus reached for him and bent his knees up, one of his hands taking Sirius’s hair out of its tie and the other around his hip, composing the pieces of their movement in unflowing tidal rhythm like two pieces of the same instrument, thrusting his cock against Sirius’s and then stroking them together in his big hand, eyelids fluttering. Bending his neck Sirius let his hair fall against Remus’s chest, flitting in vivid slow motion across the landmarks of his body: he could feel Remus’s heart between his teeth as he flicked his tongue across a nipple, his knuckles whispering over his ticklish sides, the slopes of his thighs trembling very tightly under his palms, the violin-vibrations of his belly when Sirius held him down by the hips and thrust his tongue into Remus’s navel—rhythmic—pulsebeat and breath like a fine trigger, timbre rising, vibration all through the wires of their bodies. When he murmured the spell against the inside of Remus’s thigh he felt him jolt, sudden wildfire in the arch of his spine.

“Do you think it’s watching,” asked Remus, breath in it, and fever. Sirius stroked a finger inside him, crooking it, just up to the first knuckle, taking just the head of Remus’s cock into his mouth and drawing lazy curlicue-ribbons underneath with his tongue dragging along the heavy silk of it; above him he could hear Remus’s breath tightening, his bent knees and his dark mouth spooling.

“Obviously it’s been dying to see me get you off,” said Sirius, low, at the join of Remus’s hip and thigh. “It’s probably been gagging for it for weeks and we’ve just left it high and dry the whole time. Maybe the cosmic void itself wants to fuck both of us into literal oblivion.”

“You think you’re so funny,” said Remus, flushed all through and laughing, his fingers in Sirius’s hair. Sirius pressed another finger inside him and watched his mouth fall open, thrusting in and then circling his fingertips around the rim where he could feel him wet and open, hips moving in time with Sirius’s fingers, seeking.

“So do you.”

“Yes,” said Remus. He took Sirius’s wrist and thrust his hips, pressing him deeper. When he took Remus’s cock in his mouth again Sirius let the bare white-sharp edges of his teeth graze against him as he pulled off, sucking hard, feeling the catch in Remus’s breath and the moan deep down in his chest. “God, Sirius—I was trying to—it was one of the first things I ever liked about you,” he said, “way back to day one, on the train. No one—no one can make me laugh like you do.”

As with all the other things it ran down the drain back to the train compartment when they were eleven years old, or maybe earlier, back a hundred years, a million things unsaid and undone and unknown, their souls sculpted from the same magnificent clay, yearning always through displaced time to find each other again. Sirius kissed his belly and then Remus was pushing him back by the shoulders, groaning when Sirius’s fingers slipped out of him; he was about to say something when Remus straddled his hips and all rational thought shriveled up in his dry mouth like leaves in the heat, his hands sliding along Remus’s thighs to his waist and back down again, squeezing his ass, Remus’s hands moving on his shoulders like he was the only thing in the world that could keep him still, the only thing that could make him move.

“Where’s my cock on that list,” Sirius asked him, feeling Remus sway against him like a willow tree and laugh wildly, the tremble of it reverberating in Sirius’s chest with his blood and his breath. Their bodies flowed together: wherever Remus went Sirius went, a two-headed creature made of wanting, made of loving, made of years and years and years.

“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” said Remus, and to make a point he wrapped his hand around Sirius’s cock and stroked him slowly, the callouses on his fingers dragging torturously along the entire length until he felt like a smoldering fuse, embers burning against Remus’s hand. After a few moments Remus took his fingers from where his thumb was pressing inside Sirius’s mouth and flicked it over his nipple until Sirius felt like he might actually combust, all the pieces of him straining for Remus as he had always, compelled and enthralled, overtaken.

“Remus,” he was saying, right against his lips, “please, please—”

“I thought we were,” said Remus even as he took Sirius inside himself, slow like ritual, “I thought we were talking about how funny you think you are.” The muscles in his belly torqued slightly and he hissed lithely, pressing down around him so slowly Sirius could feel his teeth clenching, watching the slide of his body into Remus’s body with an intoxicated starvation lighting up everything from his heart to his head to his gut and between his legs, lightning in it, a thick strike of pleasure welling up. “It drives me insane,” he said. “I love it and you know it.”

He shoved his hips up gently and moaned, thumbs smoothing over Remus’s hipbones while he canted his hips forward and then back in Sirius’s lap, searching. “Literally half of all the stupid shit I’ve ever said or done is just to make you laugh,” he said. In the middle of it Remus found the pure electric-current strike inside him and rode the flint-and-tinder of it, urging Sirius faster; he snapped his hips up into the heat of it, his cock thrusting deep into the oneness of it while Remus gripped his arms and ran his heavy palms up his biceps to his shoulders, gasping.

“Tell me—” Remus started, pushing him deeper and then going still where Sirius could feel his cock pressed into the gold thread he wanted, “tell me about it later.” Sirius moved his hips slowly into it, a long dragging curl of pleasure, the rush of it spreading through them in a molten wave.

“Always,” said Sirius, “you fucking know I will.” Sometimes it was like this when they had sex, conversation like chords plucked thrillingly at odd angles, and sometimes they never shut up; occasionally they didn’t talk at all, undressing in sheer silence and speaking only in the slideshow tangle of their bodies, their open mouths, their shifting faces in the sheets. With the strings of dusty-dim lights on Remus’s skin he looked like something wild and holy born of the moors and come as if conjured into Sirius’s bed in the night, where he had been waiting far beyond this lifetime to feel his breathing body, his heart.

Remus was driving him deeper and Sirius could feel the timbre of him wound tight, their rhythm like famine, an irresistible tidal pulse burgeoning; he watched at the join of their bodies, inside and around each other, one into one, and leaned forward to lick nonsense patterns against Remus’s nipple. “I almost wouldn’t mind,” said Sirius, hardly any breath, “getting killed, God, like this—just like this,” laughing, thinking perhaps they had already let the monster inside.

Against his palm he felt Remus’s cock pulse, his thumb rubbing over the slick head and smoothing down again, stroking him deliberately out of time with the thrust of their hips. After not so much longer Remus rode him harder, the angle the same, relentless, relentless, his chest thrumming with his blood and his breath in a crescendo under Sirius’s mouth as he pressed a sweaty hand around Sirius’s on his cock, his back arching like an ocean ripple. Sirius squeezed gently and twisted his wrist around the head of Remus’s cock and felt him come after two strokes, his teeth sunk into the heartbeat at Sirius’s neck, all of him clenching in a tight spool around his cock as he pulsed wet over their threaded fingers and both their bellies, his chest swelling and deflating wonderingly against Sirius’s.

He fucked Remus through it, trying to stave off coming himself, but then Remus reached down and touched the join of them where Sirius was stretched tight all around and over him as they moved, pulse and icefloe-tremble deep inside him when he rocked his hips into Sirius as if their bodies were the same, fingers around the base of Sirius’s cock where it was slick and heavy inside him. The spreading jolt when he snapped his hips into the swallowing heat of him, the drag of his cock—timbre splitting, rhythm breaking—he came, the tip and the wild overflow-spill melting through his belly through his thighs and all the uncoiling threads of him, going still inside Remus with a choked-off groan, an open-mouthed kiss pressed against his neck. Remus rocked his hips into him, gasping at the wet spread of it inside him, Sirius’s hand splayed out over the base of his spine to hold them together like two pieces of something broken soldered together with gold.

For a few long minutes Remus wouldn’t let him pull out, kissing him slowly with his sweaty fingers tracing the slowing blue staccato of his pulse up the vein-lines of his hips and chest, and when he did at last move the loss of it made him feel cold all over as if they’d just been severed, bereft in the dark. They cleaned up and laid down together, pulling the blanket back up with the tangled afghans and the enormous scarves they kept on the bed, not bothering to put on clothes, which in the current state of their nightmare hunting-by-malicious-magic-and/or ghosts seemed almost scintillatingly reckless. Under the blankets he ran a palm up the ivory-key ridges of Remus’s ribs to his shoulderblades where he was using Sirius as a pillow, stretching fluid against him with his back cracking in places; with his fingers Sirius lit a cigarette while Remus watched him take a drag and then another, his chest expanding under Remus’s head until he braced himself on his elbows and grabbed Sirius by the hair, kissing him hard, sucking down smoke.

“You know I started smoking because of you,” said Remus, the vibration of his voice blurring into Sirius’s heartbeat. The room smelled like sex and snowfall and pinewood and now menthol smoke; in Remus’s hair Sirius could still smell Earl Grey and clean sweat, stroking his fingers through the wiry last-leaf red of it. “I mean because of all of you, and because I liked it, but you especially. You look kind of unfairly good with a cigarette, like that boy you get warned about in public service announcements.”

“So now I’ve got your lungs on my conscience forever,” said Sirius. “Maybe we could quit, when this is all over.” They both laughed, though Sirius couldn’t have said which prospect was more hilarious.

“Too late, Pads.”

“If it’s any consolation you’re sexy even when you’re lying in repose after the full making me listen to your soothing folksy shit. Between you and me it gets me hot.”

“I always suspected as much. You’re so fucking weird,” said Remus, smiling like a cloudburst, looking at Sirius like he wanted to be devoured; around his throat and his chest where Sirius could see in the loamy shadow above the blanket he had purpling hickeys like small tokens, same as he’d left on Sirius. Often the next day he’d wear his scarf adjusted just _so_ in a way that made it obvious what he was not-trying to hide. “Between you and me it gets me hot.”

“Then it’s a good thing we’re both crazy because it gets me laid.”

“Haven’t we always known that from like minute one,” said Remus, laughing. “I think it was always going to head here, you know? Less immovable object and irresistible force and more irresistible force and irresistible force, like magnets maybe, or a bug on a windshield. But speaking of the full,” he grabbed Sirius’s wrist and took a drag of the cigarette between his fingers, “and the death by nicotine. Sometimes I felt like—I don’t know, like I do it to get back at myself, I suppose. And there’s the head-rush of course.”

“Like it’s the only thing you can do to hurt what you can’t reach. As miserable as that sounds,” said Sirius. He had given it some thought before and guessed it was why both of them threw themselves into the Order and went blind into jobs that odds were would land them in St. Mungo’s or a cheap coffin before twenty-two, aside from the obvious reasons.

“Yes. And the blaring kind of high that comes with it.” In the rafters Sirius could hear a rapid birdwing flutter drumming like a heart, echoing and fanning out across the wood from one end to the other, though by now they were so used to this at night they both recoiled slightly like components of the same spring-trap and then relaxed, breathing, just breathing. “Maybe we should take up embroidery instead.”

“I’ll make you a novelty t-shirt for the motorbike. ‘My Other Ride Is His Cock.’”

“God, you’re vile,” said Remus, shaking like a brittle tree branch with quiet laughter. “For Christmas I saw this coffee mug at the thrift store, it said ‘Like My Men: Cheap, Bitter, and From the Corner Store.’ I was gonna, y’know, magic over that last part and put ‘With a Bite’ instead. Thought it might be too obvious.”

Sirius laughed. “Well why the hell didn’t you,” he asked. He felt shaken out and new, his limbs slung lazily back together with golden honey, warm in all the places of himself where they had been together; the resonance of it shivered ecstatically down his body and Remus’s until everything was themselves and everything was each other, feeling echoes, feeling words and words and words.

“I didn’t say I didn’t,” said Remus, and he pressed up on his elbows with his handsome off-kilter face and his bony shoulders and his green copper-mirror eyes and kissed the laugh out of Sirius’s mouth. “Even if,” he said when he pulled back, “I mean, overlooking everything else in the whole of this bullshit world and the untold horrors I’m sure are waiting for us in the morning like a Christmas present. I’m really very happy.”

“Not to be a soppy fuck but you do make me very happy, you know,” said Sirius, stretching out beside him, Remus’s jaw brushing thrillingly against his shoulder where Sirius could feel the places he’d missed shaving, soft thistle. “No one I’d rather descend into hell with or jump off the edge of the world with, the only co-pilot I want when the plane’s going down, all that. It feels like the plug’s been pulled out of my brain, which is hilarious because that should’ve happened years ago.”

“I think it did happen years ago and that’s just our default state of being nowadays,” said Remus, “unplugged and held together with shoestring and Spello-tape, questions of sanity being what they are at the best of times. It’s almost romantic when you think about it.”

“Yeah, I’ll be sure to write Dumbledore a thank-you card. This has been the team-building exercise we needed all along, it’s not like we came out here for the scenery or anything. Who the hell does that.”

“‘Thanks ever so much for the opportunity to experience a malevolent haunting first-hand in the gaping mouth of the beast itself. This was a deep and invaluable learning experience for both of us, especially the part where Sirius hexed me when I snuck up on him with sexual intent. I owe the blistering rash on my ass to you.’”

“You’re never going to stop bitching about that,” said Sirius. He’d spent the entire evening afterwards alternating between apologizing and arguing and groveling with macaroni and cheese and planning to eat Remus out for half an hour when they went to bed, which was completely ruined when their treasured unearthly guest started hammering on the back door after dinner with extreme bloodlust. “I mean it hardly seems fair given that I basically lost the lottery there.”

“Not getting fucked is a few magnitudes worse than a screaming rash on your ass that feels like someone flayed it open. Definitely.”

“I’m gonna make it up to you if and when we get through this and you know it. For a few _magnitudes_.”

“That’s what I was counting on. But I guess it is a little bit funny, almost, and the sleep loss and bludgeoning paranoia and no sex for weeks, of course,” said Remus, smiling. “You know what I mean.”

“I know,” said Sirius, “Black and Lupin against the world. I know.” They settled into each other, skin to skin until they drifted apart in sleep, listening to the underground hum of their voices moving through their bodies like blood, or song.

For a while he dreamed he was trapped in his old bedroom at Grimmauld Place in the summer, the door locked and the window stuck shut, his wand nowhere he could find; on the empty street below someone he didn’t recognize stared up at him, unmoved by his banging on the window, unrelenting even when he closed the curtains and peeked through the gap to see if they were still there. They looked like they were waiting for something, and although he’d had very similar dreams before and he couldn’t have said why—the general cosmic terror of their current situation leaking into the funhouse of his subconscious, probably—he thought they looked angry, as if they were waiting to see him bleed and had in fact been waiting for it for a very long time. Once or twice these dreams had turned darkly erotic when Remus was involved and he’d been meaning to learn oneiromancy for years solely for the purposes of sharing acid-trip visions and sexual somnambulism, not necessarily in that order, but in the dream he began to panic: the doorknob broke off in his hand, starless nighttime dark slipped down outside while he wasn’t looking, and something began to move in the thinning walls, murmuring in the pipes and the rafters and knocking the dust from the corners, and outside something was waiting, stitched to the shadows with its mouth wide open and grinning like a knife.

He hadn’t been asleep for an hour when he woke up with his heart in his mouth, pounding so hard in his ribs he swore he could see the swill of blood skittering through his veins in the distant frost of the Muggle lights. Yet the feeling—something watching, something waiting, someone walking on his grave—did not dissipate on waking; Remus was still asleep beside him, so unfairly exhausted Sirius would not wake him for anything as he had not woken him that first night with the same deathly shadow burning at the back of his neck, watching at the nearness of their bodies, the unorchestrated togetherness of their movement. Very quietly, so softly that later he couldn’t be sure whether it had happened at all, the curtains rustled. Breathing erratically into the deafening tightrope hush it seemed to Sirius that certain things in the room were illuminated: the book on his nightstand, his ancient Television t-shirt hanging out of Remus’s dresser drawer, the dark chocolate on the tiny bookshelf they sometimes ate in bed, both chairs at the table where Sirius could just see down into the kitchen, the note he’d left in Remus’s pocket yesterday with its smeared ink, the jumble sale watch Remus had given him last Christmas, Remus’s bare shoulder beside him on the bed, his chest rising and falling with dreams. If he threw back the curtains to tear open the velvet night he was sure he would find eyes staring back at him through the driving snow, watching them, all of them, every touch and every slight, every shoe and every thread.

I fucking dare you, he was thinking rabidly, his wand held tight in a sweaty hand, I fucking dare you. I dare you to try and take this from me. I’ll put a match to this whole world. I’ll peel your skin off and eat you raw and screaming.

Whether it was rage or lust or castigation or something else, he couldn’t know. After a while the feeling of it receded somewhere deep inside with the other shadows, and darkness lapped at the room tidal and rich as burnt midnight. The rest of the night he could not remember his dreams; he woke from darkness to darkness, listening to the sound of Remus breathing on the pillow beside him, softly, softly.

—

Late in fifth year, after the Incident (the Fuck-Up, the Event, the Cataclysm , the Mistake, the Faux-Pas), he had gone with Remus to the Shack before moonrise, watching the green unfurling world through the iron-bar slats in the windows, the hills lush with life as if there had been an imperative promise breathing there even in the tomb of midwinter where everything died, worn threadbare and erased underneath the new snowfall. He hadn’t been alone with Remus much in the two months since and he had never been with him right before because Remus didn’t want it, and as Sirius watched him shivering naked at the end of the creaky bed with the wounds from the last full still unhealed red and his whole body trembling with the dirge of poison he thought he understood why. A nightbird called from somewhere outside, bearing up its longing or its pain into the mouth of the moon, beautiful without solace or solution.

“Moony,” he had said, worthlessly. He felt like all the blood had been drained out of him and he was naked and freezing and for the first time in his life he wanted to get on his knees and suck the ancient wound around Remus’s ribs where it had grown over him like moss over a tree, leech the poison out. Instead he stood a few feet in front of the bed and shivered while the moon got into Remus’s mouth and down his throat.

“Is this what you wanted,” said Remus, bitten off between his clenched teeth. He got up quick and crossed the room to where Sirius was standing like an effigy and dug his nail-bitten fingers into Sirius’s arms hard enough to draw blood; his hair was tangled in the filmy yellow eye of gloaming like a crown of thorns and he was shaking, shaking both of them apart. “Is it? Did you want to see it happen so fucking badly?”

It started not in his blood but in his bones, or not in his bones but somewhere deeper, unmappable, inextricable, something estranged yet uncontainable. From there Sirius could feel it fan out into a spinal shatter through his limbs, ribs shifting, arteries re-wiring, back bowing, shoulders snapping, skin burning with the horrible inviolable crush of light at the very rim of the horizon. There was blood between Remus’s teeth and he was panting with the umbilical pain of it, his spine cracking when his knees buckled and he dragged Sirius to the floor with him, not letting go, not letting go. Still Sirius would not change. He watched until he couldn’t any longer and felt that at some point he had started crying but he had no idea when it had happened; in front of him Remus was gasping like something newborn struggling for breath, his shoulderblades realigning under Sirius’s hand where he found his heartbeat where it had always been, beating Remus Remus Remus, Moony Moony Moony, pressing up against his own where they were almost, almost the same.

They woke up in the forest where it had rained sometime in the night, Sirius first and then Remus who watched him pick soggy leaves out of his hair in the reeling blue dawn, neither of them speaking. Together they stood up and walked back to the Shack in the amnesiac morning, stumbling through the fog with their open wounds, their first breaths hanging on the scrolling fog like tracks in new snow.

—

Much later, when Sirius thought about all the ways the world had changed and unchanged in his fractured patchwork lifetime, he would always circle around to Christmas Eve ’79, sitting on the couch with Remus listening to The Slits and _Low_ and looking out the big front window into the snowy sunset moor where nothing moved in the searching light of the boathouse, thinking how desolate it really was, how lost to the world they were. Part of the reason they had come out here was for the softness, to find a place that could swallow them up and all their history and birth them together free of ghosts, beholden to nothing but themselves and to each other—to see the wasteland bear fruit again. Even then they knew the world was hardening and that it would not stop; looking out the window with Remus he could feel them have the same thought stretching like smoke between them: something had set in the earth and it would not change again. He thought of Remus’s parents’ home in Somerset, the belly of the woods and the river, apple cores in the weedy pasture and Remus’s mother playing Ida Cox in the kitchen in the summertime. Nostalgia was a potent anesthetic but still he could not shake the feeling that the world had skipped forward like a scratched record into something dark and warped, and they could not find the exact note where it had left them behind.

They’d wrapped each other’s gifts and spent about an hour the night previous at Peter’s, who was condescending to speak to them again very suddenly for reasons still unclear and had asked them round to a small Christmas party hosted at his new girlfriend’s flat in Leeds. It had been intensely awkward at times and they had left with James and Lily after Lily claimed a headache following a conversation with Ivor Nettlebane, and they’d come home to the window in their bedroom wide open, the curtains billowing with infrequent snow, everything thrown off the bed and the only photo of them they kept out—a Muggle photograph from early spring taken by McKinnon, who had caught them unaware while they were waiting to ride the Tube for shits and giggles, Remus holding a cigarette and laughing at something Sirius had said while Sirius took his wrist and leaned in for a drag, smiling—missing from its frame on the mantel. In the night he woke to a faint scratching at the door and strange slamming far off in the distance, like a fist opening and closing on the moor.

Across the lake they could see something flitting in front of the windows of the boathouse even this far away, bright as a lighthouse now, as if it had blotted out the winterlight from the sky and the earth or else it was eating everything the way the moon did when it began to swell with voracious cyclical ritual in the sky every night. At times the ink-blot shape of it seemed to change: first a person, then hunched like an animal, then huge, unmoving, swallowing light.

“So what are we gonna do when it’s—I don’t know, when it’s finished,” Remus had wondered, finally closing the curtains when it had moved out of sight when they blinked. “After it’s done the gestation thing or whatever kind of sick magic’s going on over there.”

“Better we find it than it find us. Since apparently it’s insatiable,” Sirius had said. “Maybe we need to have a good ritual fuck outside in the snow.” That had been three days ago; they’d laughed, but he knew without asking that they both understood what it meant, that the unquestionable fight or flight was why Dumbledore had put them out there. Black and Lupin against the world, in life or in death. Happy fucking Christmas, et cetera.

As a sort of last-ditch attempt to pretend the center was holding they’d gone grocery shopping and bought good wine and fresh bread and cheeses and pomegranates and spices for mince pie, chocolate to attempt truffles, big potatoes for baking chips, a chicken to roast; the truffles contained an excessive amount of rum and had actually turned out in what was possibly their only Christmas miracle to date, which had given Sirius some hope that the rest of it would go smoothly and he might even get to seduce Remus over dinner as an early present, though he was trying not to let it show in case the slouching infernal whatever could read minds. Lately it felt like drowning every time they came home: everything dimmed, everything roared, yet it all moved very slowly, the minutes and the hours sticking like taffy. He was beginning to understand how people lived in the midst of ruin. How do you escape immolation if not through one other?

When the record shuffled over at the end of the side he got up to take it off and put some tea on the stove with clove and orange peel, listening to the wind rattle the shingles on the roof, the trees bowing in the red dusk unlight. Remus had put a pot on the woodstove with cloves and a few cinnamon sticks he’d stolen from the decorations at Peter’s Christmas party and the whole cottage smelled warm and charmed, like something well-loved; he imagined it like this always, the two of them and everything they could make between them, worn soft with time and with love and the shape-shifting that came with both. He imagined them growing old here, imagined all the years unlived, thinking of all the places where they had found each other: the kitchen counter, Tube stations, the bathroom sink, Camden pubs, unlit Hogwarts corridors, the Shack, the bedroom, the foyer in the flat, the shore of the river where Remus grew up, the left side of the bed, takeout lines, the middle cushion of the murderous couch, the stove, assorted closets at parties, the hallowed shattering minutes before moonrise, the Hogwarts Express, thresholds, dreams.

“Didn’t we have _Fun House_?” Remus was asking him when he came back into the living room. He was looking through their vinyl and his knuckles were slightly chapped from the cold like Sirius’s. “If nothing else I guess it’s got good taste.”

“ _Raw Power_ is better. _Lust for Life_ is better too.”

“Snob,” said Remus. “You love _Fun House_. I forgot to tell you—Lily swears she conceived the baby to ‘Golden Years’ and she was joking about naming it Ziggy as a kind of honor but James apparently thinks she’s serious and he’s losing it trying to figure out how to explain it to his parents. He was going to ask you but he figured you’d laugh in his face instead of behind his back.”

“I would’ve.”

“I did, too.”

“That does sound like James though. Aladdin Sane would’ve been better but if you really tried you could make it sound almost pureblood, I mean, add a few suffixes and just pretend it’s the third or fourth in its line and every kid in the Great Hall would turn their heads to see Ziggius James Lily Potter III, Esquire.”

“I turned my head to see you,” said Remus. He’d given up trying to find the vinyl and was rolling a cigarette on Sirius’s copy of _Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror_ , smiling sweetly. “I was eleven years old and I already thought you were very handsome, not that I thought about it quite like that. It was more—you were so,” he paused, brow smudged slightly in memory, licking the seam of the paper, “it was hard to look away from you, even if I hadn’t met you on the train I couldn’t have. Not to blow your ego or anything but I don’t think I ever had a chance of like, not having sex dreams about you by the time I was fourteen.”

“You know I was pissed when James took the bed between yours and mine that very first night. I tried to be a good boy and not be an obvious asshole about it,” said Sirius, feeling loopy, going to sit next to Remus on the couch with his arm slung across the back of it. He could remember nights in fifth and sixth and seventh year, lying on his bed behind the curtains with a silencing charm cast all around and Benjy Fenwick’s borrowed Walkman, listening to Remus’s _Ege Bamyasi_ tape and wondering what it meant that he was a dog and thinking Remus Remus Remus, saying it out loud occasionally just to hear what it sounded like in his mouth on his bed, feeling infiltrated and flooded through with terrified, still-uncomprehending bliss. “I used to say your name in the dark sometimes,” he said, supposing he ought to continue the confessional thread. “In school, I mean. Now whenever I do that you get to hear.”

“I always used to get this weird whole-body thrill when you said my name, or when I said yours. Sometimes I still do.”

“West Country boy,” said Sirius, his nose pressed into Remus’s neck. “I wanted to know everything about you, like every single piece of you, even what I couldn’t have. After we found out about the wolf I couldn’t stand the thought of you being alone and I used to turn into an asshole about it every month. You remember how it was.”

“I do,” said Remus, taking a drag and then another. In the corner of his mouth he was smiling like it had gotten stuck there. “Maybe we’re both sort of creepy now that I think about it.”

“We’re the creepiest people I know. And every friend group needs at least one intense homoerotic friendship that’s the subject of salacious rumors for years to come so I think we outdid everyone in our year. Maybe all of them for like the next decade.”

“I’m glad it was us and it was all absolutely true and then some in the end, except maybe the thing I heard about Majorca and the beach house seventh year,” said Remus, leering gleefully as Sirius got up. “Come back here, I’m cold.”

“The kettle’s whistling,” said Sirius, letting his fingers trail unnecessarily along Remus’s thigh as he got up, “I’ll take care of you in just a minute.”

“Two sugars,” Remus called after him.

“How long have I been making tea for you,” said Sirius, mildly outraged. Once he’d turned off the stove he came back with their mugs and then turned on the wireless, trying to catch the weather between Celestina Warbeck’s Christmas album atrocities. During the forecast—no snow, more wind, sunless dawn—the radio began to crackle strangely, hissing from the inside, static sparks sawing along the music until he thought he could almost make out a voice in it, or many, tongueless words trying to form in a mouth that could not speak.

Throat tight he leaned forward to hear, reaching out and taking Remus’s hand, fingers seeking the pulse in the blue vein-branches underneath the tearing scar around his wrist, feeling in the map of it everything he’d ever loved beating and beating up against his own heartbeat, spreading through his chest and down to his frantic hands as if they were the same miraculous creature, too grand to confine to a single body. On the radio the voice grew louder, wailing torturous unearthed fury called up from the bowels of hell itself, and with it the walls began again to move like blood, the breath of the plaster muttering its nightmare-rattle across the foundation; outside he could hear the death-march moan spreading out centrifugal from the very heart of the lake, unmistakable now as his own beating heart.

BLACK, said the voice, LUPIN BLACK LUPIN BLACK LUPIN BLACK. LET ME IN.

The cold searing jolt reverberated through them both and he could feel his fingernails bitten past the quick digging into Remus’s hand. Part of him was thinking, now or never, now or never again. They had their wands and they had each other still in one piece and he was scared shitless and sideways and yet there was something in them—not love, or not only, and not magic or not only, but an unconquerable, invincible truth, a thing born of history and time and loving and hating and wanting and running and finding and unknowing and unbreaking, born of every step he had ever taken towards Remus. He knew, with a rare and invulnerable certainty, that they would come back to this house tonight. He knew with every part of him that had ever mattered and every piece of himself that had ever loved anything that they would find their way. They would come back to each other. They would come back to each other.

If he’d said it out loud he figured Remus would either have started a fistfight with him on the spot—imminent agonizing death be damned—or Stunned him and dragged him out of the house to the Apparition point or said it was just like Sirius to assume they were the heroes of their own story with a happy ending to wait out, and as he’d have been infuriatingly fucking correct Sirius didn’t say anything. Tugging on Remus’s hand he stood until Remus stood with him, the house grinding its teeth in the floorboards, the voice on the radio howling moaning screaming its monstrous death-trip dirge:

YOU FORFEIT WHAT YOU HAVE. GIVE IT TO ME. LET ME IN. BLACK AND LUPIN. LET ME IN. BLACK AND LUPIN. LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN—

“I think you were half-right,” said Sirius, yanking Remus towards their coats, “I think, Jesus bloody motherfucker, it wants _us_. It wants—”

Remus stared at him, pale like he normally only got when the moon was just on the wane, spat out of the earth and newborn in the brimming metallic womb of dawn. Understanding splashed across his bright lovely face like cold water. “Those—the other ones, the ones who disappeared. They let it in. They thought they could just lock the door and make it go away but they let it in.”

“Remember? The Aurors found the door open. The just—they let it come to them, Remus, we can’t, we have to do something. It wants— _this_ , us. Everything.”

“Well it’s not fucking getting it,” said Remus. Sirius dragged a hand through his dark hair and pulled him towards their coats on the wall and their boots but Remus stumbled backwards to the coffee table, reaching for his tea.

“What the fuck are you _doing_? Moony we have to go, come on—shoes—come on, _now_.”

“If I’m going out I my goddamn tea first.”

We are insane, Sirius thought, wild blood-burst frenzied crush of love, this is insane, we are insane, hence we will be back before the tea goes cold. “Remus,” he said, “Moony. Moony love.” He took the cup out of Remus’s hands and put it back on the coaster, coaxing him back to the door while the floor shuddered awake beneath their feet. “We’re going to come back,” he said. In the kitchen he could hear the shutters on the window slamming against the house; they tied their boots quick and stepped into their coats running, the door already open for them. “We have presents and mince pie and not to ruin anything but I really did buy an eighth of weed. It’s been in my sock drawer for five days and so far I’ve stayed out of it so you can extol my incomparable patience when we get home. We’re coming back.”

“You fucking nutcase,” said Remus, laughing without breath. By now they were running side by side, wands held out cutting into the nightmare curtain hanging all along the moor to the boathouse, lit like a second moon on the lake, swallowing light, swallowing life, swallowing time. “Why do I believe you,” said Remus, and in the dark—arms outstretched blind on a tightrope he reached out in love and took Sirius’s hand, holding on tight, strung along by their uncontainable heartbeat-pulse to anywhere, anywhere.

Buried among the snow and decades of brush was an old wooden fishing boat with no oar. Together they dug it out and set it in the water, sure at first that it would sink even after they cast _Impervius_ a few times, but it did not; across the deep gleaming water on the matted pelt of land was forever, was the end, was what had always been, was every step he and Remus had ever taken together, every fuck-up and every peal of irrevocable nighttime laughter and every touch and every displaced yearning welling up a hundred miles away in letters and sleepless loveless nothing-nights and music and dreaming and desire, the always-desire for all the life and all the time and all the love they had yet to give each other. The boathouse smoldered like a bad wound, and in the window something watched them, waiting, a person or a wraith or a shade of dark magic; they would unmake it, he knew, they would erase its place in the world, though he still felt the bottom drop out of him, as if he had fallen and all his pieces hadn’t landed in the right order.

Remus turned to him with their boots in the water, their reflections rippling sepulchral on the water beneath the glacial light of their wands. On his face was a sort of terrified bliss, his mouth open and his eyeteeth showing over his bottom lip, that famished look Sirius loved; he grabbed Remus by the shoulders and kissed him hard, fever-hot, blood in it, and honesty, and music. Within him he’d sometimes thought there was an image or a map of Remus, what he’d need to get back, what he’d need to find his way home again no matter how far or how long he had wandered, no matter how lost to each other they had become.

“I love you,” he said, his breath all smoke, stroking Remus’s cheekbones with his freezing thumbs where Remus’s hands had come up to cover his own, strong, like driftwood, warmth in it. “I love you to a degree that is probably classifiable as its own very specific insanity, and you are all—you’re so—fuck, I love you, Remus, I love you better than I love anything, I’d give up magic or, or fucking _anything_ , when Muggles say that thing, would you jump off a cliff if so-and-so did it, well yes, if you did it, yes I would. It’s that much, it’s just—I loved you before I knew you, I swear it, I was always going to—”

He knew he must look royally unhinged but so did Remus, who pulled his hair and kissed him again, not letting go, not letting go. “When we get home I’m going to tell you how horribly I love you like jumping off a cliff et cetera, because it’d be me jumping after you,” said Remus. Against him Sirius’s heart quickened and he worried briefly at the swill of blood that he might have a heart attack before they could exorcise any dark magic from the moor. “I’m also going to absolutely fucking—I’m going to blow your mind when we get home. But let’s,” he said, “let’s go, Sirius, let’s,” and steered them toward the boat, pointing them towards the far shore of the nightmare.

They got in the boat and sat until it steadied, using a spell to propel it slowly across the water, the unpeeled rind of the scythe-moon blurred to a candle-flame flicker by the light coming off the lake, the trees and the leggy cattails and the sediment all murmuring, the shadow blading across the window into the deep water as the boat hit land, both of them shielding their eyes against the light burning high like a dying star. Cold snow on their boots, shallow water, the owl-calls in the murky middle distance reminding him that there was something beyond this, that it would be over soon, that there was tea and an empty bed waiting for him at home after all the miles and miles they had left to go.

When they got out of the boat into the water where wood was rotting under the moss, Remus held his hand against the strange current where nothing else mattered but their breathing bodies, their clockwork connection; this was what he was for, he realized. This was what he was for. Blind but sure-footed they stepped forward together into the monstrous mouth of the night, magic spilling golden and unbidden between their fingers, for better or for worse. Life was inescapable, absolute, everywhere.

—

The tea turned out to be lukewarm.


End file.
